THE National Food Coalition (NFC) on Friday, December 11, called for the immediate passage of laws to help the government achieve the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals on zero hunger in the Philippines.
"We want to help the nation’s leaders push the right policies regarding [hunger and poverty]," said Aurea Miclat-Teves, NFC president and convener.
In a virtual press conference, the anti-hunger advocate maintained that food and nutrition "is not yet explicitly recognized in the Philippine Constitution."
Unlike political rights and civil liberties enjoyed by the Filipinos, the convenor said various laws on their rights to food are “non-complementary, inadequately and improperly implemented, incoherent and sometimes in conflict with each other.”
"We earnestly request the Duterte administration to certify as urgent the Right to Adequate Food Framework Bill, or the Zero Hunger Bill, now pending in the House and the Senate," Miclat-Teves said.
She added that “actions must be taken" to implement the government's National Food Policy (NFP) that is supposed to address the country’s priority concerns of hunger and poverty.
Cabinet Secretary Karlo Nograles, who chairs the Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF) on Zero Hunger, said they had concluded a series of consultations with stakeholders in government and in the private sector on the NFP last week.
"We conducted the consultations thoroughly with as many partners as possible because we wanted a comprehensive and doable set of solutions. We also wanted all stakeholders to actively participate in enforcing the NFP based on their own inputs," the official said.
During the press conference, Nograles maintained that fighting hunger “is a whole nation approach” and that everyone plays a critical role.
According to the Cabinet official, the government’s efforts on nutrition got a momentum during the pre-coronavirus disease (Covid-19) pandemic in 2018 and 2019.
President Rodrigo Duterte created the IATF on Zero Hunger through Executive Order (EO) 101 signed on January 10, 2020.
Sustainable food policy
Miclat-Teves said that even as the government has established the task force, "there is a need for legislation to make the national food policy sustainable."
The coalition leader said a law upholding the right to food and nutrition or RTFN can compel the government "to provide adequate food for all Filipinos at all times."
"This could also serve as a legal back-up to any economic and social program on hunger and poverty," said Miclat-Teves.
“The bill defines the right to food as a legal right and seeks to end hunger progressively in ten years. It also rationalizes all food-related measures already existing in the country,” she added.
The coalition also said that there is a need to pass a new agrarian reform law that will respect the rights of indigenous peoples while ensuring the modernization of the country's agriculture and fisheries sectors.
According to the coalition, the rights of indigenous peoples are "disrespected as big mining companies violate ancestral domains and destroy tribal lands, resulting in the dislocation of peoples."
"The twin goals of achieving equity and productivity have been sidelined, leaving our marginalized sectors, especially our indigenous peoples, farmers and fisherfolk, still hungry and impoverished," said Miclat-Teves.
She also pushed for proper disaster risk reduction, saying "poverty is magnified or exacerbated by disasters."
"This is often tragically dramatized by the slow flow of emergency aid to the poor who suffer the most from any disaster," the coalition leader said in a statement.
"In embarking on disaster risk reduction, the Philippine government should consider climate change mitigation from a more comprehensive right to food perspective. We believe taking concrete steps to fulfil these three major concerns will make a strong headway toward addressing poverty and hunger," Miclat-Teves said.
Citing a report from Philippine Statistics Authority, the coalition of anti-hunger advocates said the estimated poverty rate in the country was 16.6 percent in 2018 and 17.6 million people faced extreme poverty.
“Hunger is one of the critical problems stemming from poverty in the Philippines, with 64 percent of the population suffering from chronic food insecurity,” said the coalition.
A Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey conducted in September also said more than seven million Filipino households have experienced involuntary hunger at least once from June to August this year.
“The SWS survey showed that families who experienced hunger due to lack of food reached a new record-high of 30.7 percent. This figure surpassed the previous peak of 23.8 percent in March 2012,” added the coalition.
The anti-hunger advocates identified the “deteriorating food security” in Mindanao region, which has endured four decades of armed conflict that resulted in more than 40 percent of families displaced between 2000 and 2010.
Natural disasters like typhoons, at a rate of about 20 per year, also compounded the problems of hunger and poverty in the country.
A report from the World Food Program also said that factors such as climate issues and political challenges have contributed to the food insecurity that Filipinos continuously face.
Meanwhile, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, in its State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, estimated that “almost 690 million people went hungry in 2019 - up by 10 million from 2018, and by nearly 60 million in five years.”
"The hungry are most numerous in Asia, but expanding fastest in Africa. Across the planet, the report forecasts, the Covid-19 pandemic could tip over 130 million more people into chronic hunger by the end of 2020," it added. (SunStar Philippines)