Saturday, October 18, 2008 Oledan: Mockery By Radzini Oledan Slice of life
TOO poor in terms of food. Drastic cuts in responding to basic household necessities, including food, have high repercussion.
Today, three out of 10 pre-schoolers are malnourished or underweight. In actual numbers, there are 3.7 million malnourished pre-school children. All indications show that majority of the families have lowered their living standards to cope with hunger.
These statistics do not include children in far-flung areas who are unable to gain access to health services such as monthly checkups and routine immunizations.
In sitios outside of the city, families are torn between earning for their families through farming and other agricultural activities, and in spending almost half a day going to the barangay health center where they have to wait for another three hours for health officers to arrive.
By the time the health personnel arrive, young mothers and their children are already dead tired and hungry, yet grateful that they are able to gain access to health services. They again wait for another hour and a half as health workers go through their files and conduct basic examination.
Nutrition is also wanting. A significant number of children are suffering from third degree malnutrition and it is only matter of time when children who are considered to be 2nd degree malnourished would join the ranks of third degree malnourished.
Communities are also wanting in terms of health education. The desire to end hunger does not guarantee that nutritious food is also available. In most cases, poor families sustain their day with a cup of noodles.
But simple solutions such as planting malunggay and other vegetables in the backyard could substantially solve the hunger and malnutrition problem. But this information should be deliberately communicated to households. Some may argue that there are problems of space with which to plant, still alternatives are available.
I remember a report from the National Statistics Office (NSO) which shows 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.
Another data from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) shows that 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 as a problem. 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, 4 million out of the total 25 million Filipino children are working.
Around 67 percent of these children, according to the United Nations Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF), were working in the agricultural sector and had to stop going to school. About 50 percent of the children were feeding their respective families.
Yes, this country is too poor in terms of food. Forget the lines "Ramdam ang Kaunlaran" which is slowly turning into a mockery everyday for the ordinary Filipinos- the struggling taxpayers.
