Monday, June 18, 2007 Editorial: Beyond numbers By Radzini Oledan
THERE MAY be economic indicators but glaring of all is the number of children who are caught in the cycle of poverty.
In a World Bank report, 12.7 percent Filipinos were considered as poor or those who lived on less than U.S.$1 a day while 45.9 percent were "near poor" or those who lived on less than U.S. $2 a day.
Social survey has also shown that around 52 percent of Filipinos believed that their quality of life had deteriorated over the past 12 months while only 15 percent said otherwise.
The NSO reported that poverty incidence affected 19.9 percent of families in urban areas and 46.9 percent in rural areas. Real number of poor families climbed to 5.1 million, 1.5 million of them in urban areas and 3.6 million in rural areas. Some 2.5 million families were living in subsistence level, meaning their income was not enough to buy their basic food requirements.
Only 80 Percent Had Access to Safe Water. Access to safe drinking water dropped to 80 percent among Filipino, according to the Annual Poverty Indicators Survey (APIS) conducted by the National Statistics Office (NSO).
The Annual Poverty Indicators Survey (APIS) conducted by the National Statistics Office (NSO) showed that the percentage of Filipino families with access to sanitary toilet improved to 86.1 percent in 2002 from 85.8 percent in 1999. In real number, this translates to 13.713 million families with sanitary toilet in 2002, up from 12.662 million families three years earlier.
16 Percent Experiences Hunger at least once in the last three months, according to SWSA survey conducted by Social Weather Stations (SWS). About six percent of the households surveyed also claimed that they were experiencing hunger often or always.
The Food and Agriculture Organization (Fao) said about 20 to 34 percent of 74.2 million Filipinos are undernourished, a situation which is worse than those in Indonesia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam where only five to 19 percent of the population was undernourished.
Some 25,000 people reportedly die of hunger and poverty each day. Measured annually, around six million children under the age of five are dying of hunger.
Child labor remains a problem in the country. There are 1.391 million families or 12.8 percent of the total that had working children aged from five years old to 17 years old. So critical was the poverty incidence in the country that many Filipino children had to find work. According to the NSO, four million out of the total 25 million Filipino children are working.
Most of these working children were male, aged 10 to 17 years old, unskilled and unpaid. They worked as farmers, fishermen, hunters, vendors, and factory workers. Some 221,000 children did heavy physical work; 1.1 million faced physical hazards; 942,000 suffered injuries at work; and 754,000 had work-related illnesses.
These figures were consistent with the findings of an international institution. According to the United Nations Children's Emergency Fund (Unicef), some four million Filipino children were forced to work as of 2002 because their parents could not find jobs.
Around 67 percent of these children were working in the agricultural sector and had to stop going to school. About 50 percent of the children were feeding their respective families.
A 2002 study conducted by the Philippine Congress showed that about 15.6 million or more than 60 percent of the 25 million Filipino children (below 18 years old) were malnourished.
In a separate study conducted by the Food and Nutrition Research Institute (FNRI), three out of 10 Filipino pre-schoolers were found malnourished or underweight. In actual numbers, there were 3.7 million malnourished pre-school children.
The numbers continue. We are reaping the fruit of our misplaced priorities, agenda and biases.
