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Sunday, October 12, 2003
Wenceslao: Bringing in the clowns
By Bong Wenceslao
BANGKOK–Three years into the new millennium, “progress in reducing world hunger virtually ground to a stop,” the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has warned.
Adverse impacts are rippling out on men, women and children in Asia and the Pacific, including the Philippines, FAO’s regional office here notes.
Against that backdrop, the “issues” that obsess media – from “probes in aid of legislation” smears to Joey-Kris zarzuelas – wither into pap.
Over half the world’s people are crammed into this region. China, India and Indonesia account for over 2.5 billion. The 80 million Filipinos today will number 115.5 million in 23 years time if present fertility rates persist. And two-thirds of the 1.2 billion “absolute poor” huddle in the region.
The “people who pronounce,” on our networks, don’t bother to tell us. But out of every 100 Filipinos, 23 are undernourished while 15 make do with P55 a day.
Regionwide, over 508 million remain ill fed, down from 751 million in the ‘70s.
In our villages, as in Laos or Bangladesh, women stunted by hunger give birth to underweight children. In turn, they will mother smaller infants. And this obscenity is passed from one generation to another.
This shriveling away of infants remains invisible, whether to urban slums, farmhouses or “exclusives” on Kris, Joey, Ruffa, etc. It will never make “Game Ka Na Ba?”
“These are men and women of the broken plough, who bear the face of hunger, and for whom it is almost too late,” the late Ubaidullah Khan of FAO once said.
Yet, until the end of the last century, this region posted remarkable progress.
China reduced the number of its undernourished by 74 million; along its coastal areas, 150 million were lifted from income poverty. That’s the equivalent of 10 Hungarys.
Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam pruned their rolls of the ill fed by over three million each.
Nor has it been all bleak for the Philippines. The latest Annual Poverty Indicators Survey by the National Statistics Office, for example, reveals that a smaller percentage of families found it necessary to use their kids for child labor. More were enrolled in school.
But these are not enough, given escalating local demands and the regionwide setback.
Natural disasters (Asia and the Pacific are lashed by the highest number worldwide), conflict, financial upheavals, political instability, have dragged back growth.
This setback inflicts human costs. “In 21 countries, a larger proportion of people is going hungry,” the UN Human Development Report 2003 notes. “In 34, life expectancy has fallen. Such reversals in survival were previously rare.”
Are these developments “newsworthy”?
Not if we go by the ABS-CBN apologia for its Kris-Joey feeding frenzy. That defense was anchored on one narrow definition of what constitutes news from a Columbia University handbook. There was no reference at all to “the press as schoolmasters of the people.”
Journalistic tunnel visions blot out consequences of this setback. But the impact is immediate. And it’s most onerous for impoverished small producers: sharecroppers, farmers tilling infertile slivers, harvesters in shrinking forests and fisherfolk on depicted coastal seas.
Ironically, part of the hopes for food tomorrow rests partly on these frail men and women. “It is unfair that those who produce the food are often the ones who suffer poverty the most,” the late Malaysian Prime Minister Datuk Hussien Onn had said.
UP School of Economics’ Arsenio Balisacan notes that agriculture productivity here inches up only by a piddling 1.7 percent annually. For decades, it hovered at that near stagnation levels despite restless growing populations with spiraling aspirations.
The Philippines boasts of outstanding research institutions like IRRI and UP Los Baños. But rice yield per hectare here is the lowest in all of East Asia: three tons per hectare compared to China’s six. Yield from corn is even lower: two tons per hectare compared to China’s five.
(October 12, 2003 issue)
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