Too late, too late?
Too late, too late?
Updated 10:54pm (Mla time) Oct 11, 2004
By Juan Mercado
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A10 of the October 12, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
TO a people, famished and idle, the only form in which God dares to appear is work and the promise of food. -- Ghandi
The Mahatma's insight echoes in today's debate over a cash-strapped government's plan to distribute monthly P1,200 in food coupons to impoverished families who find themselves forced to skip meals.
The project follows the latest survey by the Social Weather Stations (SWS) research group. The SWS reports, that among other things, the number of Filipinos who had nothing to eat once a day, at least on one occasion in the previous three months, rose by 15 percent -- the highest since March 2001.
Hunger in all areas spread, except in the Visayas region. Metro Manila and the rest of Luzon reported "new record highs." A majority of households (53 percent) felt they'd been beggared. In the previous quarter, 46 percent viewed themselves poor.
"Food is the first need of every human being," the World Food Congress at The Hague declared. "But for millions, that need is not met and this fundamental human right denied. This is intolerable."
Sawdust-dry statistics, on this "intolerable" situation, can smother how chronic hunger shatters lives and hopes. Periodic surveys, however, trace its latest contours. They permit comparison over time and strip away tunnel vision.
That helps. Many wedge critical issues, like poverty and hunger, within a narrow perspective: this administration's lifespan and that of the previous regime. The problems are complex.
Poverty and its twin, hunger, are "rooted in a state of powerlessness," notes the latest UN report on its Philippine program: "A Common View, A Common Journey." They're "not merely the absence of assets and services to meet basic needs."
Philippine economic growth has been poor, and not pro-poor. This severely eroded people's health. TB, malaria and dengue persist at unacceptably high rates. So do maternal deaths: 172 per 100,000 live births, compared with Thailand's 44 per 100,000.
Hunger and the resulting vulnerability are rooted in our troubled past's social injustices. Persistent lags in reform will haunt our equally troubled future.
Consider nutrition. Over an 11-year period, it improved by five percent. At that rate, "it will take half a century before we can eradicate malnutrition," wailed the fifth of six previous national nutrition surveys.
Conducted every five years, the sixth was released last July. The nation paid little attention then. Overseas Filipino worker Angelo de la Cruz's escaping terrorist beheading transfixed us.
Barely noticed, protein energy malnutrition ushers a bigger proportion of Filipino pre-school children into premature graves than in poorer Bangladesh, Kenya or Tanzania, World Bank and Asian Development Bank reported in Early Childhood Development.
Four out of 10 pregnant women today are anemic. About the same number of mothers who breast-fed are afflicted. "These dry statistics document a lethal cycle: The ill-fed give birth to wizened infants who, in their turn, will mother a generation of dwarfed babies."
Poor nutrition stunts about half (47 percent) of kids in the provinces of Negros Occidental and Northern Samar, a decade-earlier survey found.
"Give the poor reason for hope," Nobel Laureate Armatya Sen advises. Before chronic hunger hardens into despair, the administration is scraping funds for food stamps.
There are no illusions. This is a stopgap measure. "The last thing a person dizzy from days without food needs is a teach-in on nationalist industrialization," Senator Ralph Recto snapped.
But is this too little, too late? What about policies for the long haul? Our food comes from those who farm and fish, nowhere else. What's being done for them?
Yet, these very men and women are cut off from adequate credit, organization, research, extension, to education and agrarian reform. The elite corner resources and cream off benefits. Voiceless indigents are powerless to shape decisions that allocate resources.
As a result, they do not "produce." Nor do they conserve ecosystems. Why should they? They have no stake in repackaging poverty. "If the rich could hire the poor to die for them, the poor would make a wonderful living," the Yiddish proverb says.
Parallel fiscal reforms are urgent for job creation. Food stocks mean nothing to a family that cannot buy them. Unlocking the human potential remains the central tension-filled question.
Due to media, the poor know their deprivation and premature graves are not inevitable. "Too little, too late" unleashes expectations of whirlwind force -- which communists, party-list radicals and multiple fronts seek to saddle and ride.
Provide "unequal opportunity for the weak," Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal counsels. For once, we must stack the cards to favor the poor. That's not charity but long denied social justice. It's also the only way we can survive as a free community.
Today's "obsolete social system favors inherited wealth and power... and dispenses the nation's resources in response to political imperatives," Inquirer's Randy David notes. "No president can last while this system endures."
Just as succinctly, then-World Bank president Robert McNamara says: "Too little, too late is history's universal epitaph for political regimes which lost their mandates to demands of landless, jobless, disenfranchised and desperate men."
* * *
(E-mail: juan_mercado@pacific.net.ph)
Updated 10:54pm (Mla time) Oct 11, 2004
By Juan Mercado
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A10 of the October 12, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
TO a people, famished and idle, the only form in which God dares to appear is work and the promise of food. -- Ghandi
The Mahatma's insight echoes in today's debate over a cash-strapped government's plan to distribute monthly P1,200 in food coupons to impoverished families who find themselves forced to skip meals.
The project follows the latest survey by the Social Weather Stations (SWS) research group. The SWS reports, that among other things, the number of Filipinos who had nothing to eat once a day, at least on one occasion in the previous three months, rose by 15 percent -- the highest since March 2001.
Hunger in all areas spread, except in the Visayas region. Metro Manila and the rest of Luzon reported "new record highs." A majority of households (53 percent) felt they'd been beggared. In the previous quarter, 46 percent viewed themselves poor.
"Food is the first need of every human being," the World Food Congress at The Hague declared. "But for millions, that need is not met and this fundamental human right denied. This is intolerable."
Sawdust-dry statistics, on this "intolerable" situation, can smother how chronic hunger shatters lives and hopes. Periodic surveys, however, trace its latest contours. They permit comparison over time and strip away tunnel vision.
That helps. Many wedge critical issues, like poverty and hunger, within a narrow perspective: this administration's lifespan and that of the previous regime. The problems are complex.
Poverty and its twin, hunger, are "rooted in a state of powerlessness," notes the latest UN report on its Philippine program: "A Common View, A Common Journey." They're "not merely the absence of assets and services to meet basic needs."
Philippine economic growth has been poor, and not pro-poor. This severely eroded people's health. TB, malaria and dengue persist at unacceptably high rates. So do maternal deaths: 172 per 100,000 live births, compared with Thailand's 44 per 100,000.
Hunger and the resulting vulnerability are rooted in our troubled past's social injustices. Persistent lags in reform will haunt our equally troubled future.
Consider nutrition. Over an 11-year period, it improved by five percent. At that rate, "it will take half a century before we can eradicate malnutrition," wailed the fifth of six previous national nutrition surveys.
Conducted every five years, the sixth was released last July. The nation paid little attention then. Overseas Filipino worker Angelo de la Cruz's escaping terrorist beheading transfixed us.
Barely noticed, protein energy malnutrition ushers a bigger proportion of Filipino pre-school children into premature graves than in poorer Bangladesh, Kenya or Tanzania, World Bank and Asian Development Bank reported in Early Childhood Development.
Four out of 10 pregnant women today are anemic. About the same number of mothers who breast-fed are afflicted. "These dry statistics document a lethal cycle: The ill-fed give birth to wizened infants who, in their turn, will mother a generation of dwarfed babies."
Poor nutrition stunts about half (47 percent) of kids in the provinces of Negros Occidental and Northern Samar, a decade-earlier survey found.
"Give the poor reason for hope," Nobel Laureate Armatya Sen advises. Before chronic hunger hardens into despair, the administration is scraping funds for food stamps.
There are no illusions. This is a stopgap measure. "The last thing a person dizzy from days without food needs is a teach-in on nationalist industrialization," Senator Ralph Recto snapped.
But is this too little, too late? What about policies for the long haul? Our food comes from those who farm and fish, nowhere else. What's being done for them?
Yet, these very men and women are cut off from adequate credit, organization, research, extension, to education and agrarian reform. The elite corner resources and cream off benefits. Voiceless indigents are powerless to shape decisions that allocate resources.
As a result, they do not "produce." Nor do they conserve ecosystems. Why should they? They have no stake in repackaging poverty. "If the rich could hire the poor to die for them, the poor would make a wonderful living," the Yiddish proverb says.
Parallel fiscal reforms are urgent for job creation. Food stocks mean nothing to a family that cannot buy them. Unlocking the human potential remains the central tension-filled question.
Due to media, the poor know their deprivation and premature graves are not inevitable. "Too little, too late" unleashes expectations of whirlwind force -- which communists, party-list radicals and multiple fronts seek to saddle and ride.
Provide "unequal opportunity for the weak," Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal counsels. For once, we must stack the cards to favor the poor. That's not charity but long denied social justice. It's also the only way we can survive as a free community.
Today's "obsolete social system favors inherited wealth and power... and dispenses the nation's resources in response to political imperatives," Inquirer's Randy David notes. "No president can last while this system endures."
Just as succinctly, then-World Bank president Robert McNamara says: "Too little, too late is history's universal epitaph for political regimes which lost their mandates to demands of landless, jobless, disenfranchised and desperate men."
* * *
(E-mail: juan_mercado@pacific.net.ph)
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