Sunday, March 11, 2007 Mercado: Squandering lamplighters By Juan L. Mercado Sidebar
“NO street lamp will relight the addled brains of kids dwarfed by chronic hunger.” That crack spun off from an Ombudsman decision to probe purchase of Asean summit street lamps. Were they overpriced, by 14 times, in cities where 37 out of 100 students are ill-fed, anemic and stunted?
Ombudsman Visayas froze payment for P120 million worth of Asean summit decorative street lamps. Cebu, Mandaue and Lapu-Lapu were dunned from P94,000 to P224,000 for a lantern. The Commission on Audit is checking if similar lights, in Naga town, cost only P16,000.
“Plunder,” snapped Mayor Tomas Osmeña after Mandaue bought 124 lanterns at almost a quarter of a million pesos each. Blame the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH), Mayor Thadeo Ouano fumed. Sure. It was Mandaue taxpayers’ money but DPWH decided.
Ho-hum. Didn’t Adam mumble a similar dodge in the Garden: “The woman made me do it.”
This pillage is obscene because it occurred in cities where poverty is massive and hidden hunger is rife. Many kids trudge to school without breakfast.
In Mandaue and Lapu-Lapu, 34 out of every 100 pre-schoolers are scrawny listless underweights. Poverty forces 33 percent of students to drop out before reaching Grade 6. Three out of 10 are iodine deficient. And 51 percent are short of Vitamin A.
Government flubbed all it’s self-imposed targets to wrestle down malnutrition, notes University of the Philippines’ Cecilia Florencio. Over five years, the number of ill-fed underweight kids declined by only 1.4 percent. At this rate, “it may take 37 years” before the 1990 prevalence of underweight children is reduced by half.”
Nutrition gaps have instead widened, the last survey found. More kids, pregnant women and lactating mothers have become vulnerable, thanks to grasping “lamp-lighters.”
Scrawny mothers often given birth to wizened kids who, by age 3, will also be stunted, Asian Development Bank notes.
Worse, intelligence quotients (IQ), in malnourished children, can be sapped by “10 to 14 percent.” That damage is irreversible.
“Their elevators will never go to the top floor,” notes an educator.
Over “a decade of experience” under the Local Government Code shows many examples of dynamic nutrition programs, Professor Florencio writes. These models can blaze paths for local officials, whose use of enhanced LGU revenues is straight-jacketed to paying themselves swollen honoraria.
Within Cebu City’s north congressional district, 31 elementary schools get pan de sal, baked from wheat laced with iron and Vitamin A. This is a joint project of the Nutrition Center of the Philippines and Deputy Speaker Raul del Mar. It now reaches 35,000 students, an evaluation study notes. The spill-over benefits “teachers, parents and even members of the community.”
Much of “pork barrel” is dissipated into “waiting-shed” type of projects. But del Mar’s P4.8 million “Nutri-Pan” went for Vitamin A, iron and wheat. Studies in 2004 show that fortified bread boosts weight and clips moderate anemia.
“Our students need not be frailer, shorter or lighter than their Malaysian or Korean counterparts,” Del Mar explains. “Better nutrition will boost their academic performance.”
Mens sana in corpore sano, the ancient philosophers insisted. “A healthy mind in a healthy body.” That still holds for people today. To achieve broad-based health in a country dominated by avaricious oligarchs, you must “provide unequal opportunity for the weak,” the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal once counseled. Like “Nutri Pan”?
This country will flourish only if price-padding “lamplighters” are thrashed and respect for the human right of people, to adequate nutrition, finally relights “the addled brains of kids dwarfed by chronic hunger.”
