Friday, April 04, 2008 36.1 percent of N. Mindanao households are poor
THE National Statistical Coordinating Board (NSCB) has recently computed that 36.1 percent of the families in Northern Mindanao are poor.
Results of the 2006 family income and expenditure survey conducted by the National Statistics Office (NSO) showed that the average monthly income of families in Northern Mindanao is at P9,667 with average expenditures of P7,917. This marks a six percent increase from the 2003 average.
The annual poverty threshold for the said year is at P14,199. Poverty threshold refers to the minimum income or expenditure required for a family or individual to meet the basic food and non-food requirements. Families whose income falls below the poverty threshold are considered poor.
Incidence of poverty among families in Northern Mindanao had dropped 1.6 percentage points from 2003. The country's poor families are at 4.7 million.
Misamis Occidental, with an annual per capita poverty threshold at P14,555, is among the top 10 poorest provinces in 2006. Poverty incidence in the province was at 48.8 percent.
For a family of five, P4,065 a month is needed to meet the basic food needs, which satisfies the nutritional requirements for economically necessary and socially desirable activities.
Food threshold in the region had increased compared to the P3,331.25 three years earlier. Food poverty incidence in the region had declined from 19.5 percent in 2003 to 19.2 percent in 2006.
Individually, almost half (43.1 percent) of the population in the region was poor in 2006. More than half or 56.3 percent of the population in Misamis Occidental were considered poor wherein it had increased by two percentage points from 2003.
Almost a million -- equivalent to a quarter of the population in the region were also found out to be poor. This shows a 0.2 percentage point decrease from what was posted three years earlier.
Self-rated poverty incidence was also included in the 2006 family income and expenditure survey and the result is yet to be released. (Press release)
