2 weeks ago
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It is easy to give the oft-repeated advice to teach poor people how to fish rather than giving them fish. As anyone who has been involved in development work in poor countries knows, this is very reasonable and wise advice to follow in the long run. "Teaching" always takes some time, however. As the famous British economist, Lord John Maynard Keynes, famously quipped, "In the long run we are all dead." This epithet could not be applied more aptly than to the problem of world hunger. If we don't feed a hungry person, especially a child, today, he or she may not die physically now, but may suffer irreparable damage to the brain and become forever stunted.
In an article for the Financial Times on Jan. 22, 2025, science commentator Anjana Ahuja wrote that it is an easy statistic to reel off: there are 60 million children under 5 years of age around the world who have stunted growth. Not many fully understand what this means. As Ms. Ahuja explained, "More often than not, it means a child does not have enough to eat, or their intake lacks the nutrients for full development. Though we tend to associate stunted growth with shortened height, it means more than a few irreversibly lost inches. Early undernutrition and malnutrition can go on to permanently sour adulthood, by lowering cognition and wages, and raising susceptibility to diseases."
In the Philippines, there is a growing consensus among health workers and educators that the very poor performance of Filipino youth in international achievement tests can be greatly attributed to the fact that many of them were undernourished or malnourished in their childhood and had their brains damaged. No amount of quality teaching can address this problem of stunting. This widespread problem in the Philippines is very well explained in a highly valuable document published by the National College of Public Administration of the University of the Philippines entitled "Post-Pandemic Policy for Food Security," edited by Gilberto M. Llanto and Enrico Basilio.
In a document entitled "Comprehensive Food Security Framework," there is a suggestion that there should be a dual-track approach to address food security, which is being given the highest priority by the BBM Administration. The first and more urgent track consists of a package of measures that address the immediate needs of those who are unable to meet food and nutrition requirements. The second track is about medium- and long-term interventions to ensure food security for the country and for poor households especially. This second track has to do with improving the productivity of the agribusiness sector, from farming to post-harvest, cold storage, logistics, supply chain, manufacturing, and retailing.
Under the first track, to which private food foundations belong, we have emergency food assistance, payment of living wages; nutrition interventions; cash transfers and social protection instruments; access to inputs; and food price policy interventions. This track fulfills a humanitarian role, as in the case of the last Covid pandemic. This first track refers not only to emergency assistance to address immediate issues of hunger and deprivation. There is also the need to expand social and food safety programs for households that experience a considerable decline in incomes. Examples would be middle-income households who are victims of natural disasters like floods, earthquakes, and prolonged drought.
There is enlightened criticism of overdoing the "Ayuda" approach among politicians. This has especially come to light in the ongoing controversy about how the Philippine Congress diverted funds in the 2025 National Budget needed for education and health to pork barrel expenditures in the form of "Ayuda" or cash transfer programs to their poor constituents in order to solicit votes. This reasonable criticism coming from civil society, including Church leaders, should not, however, lead to a blanket condemnation of "Cash Transfer" programs. As the document from the U.P. College of Administration objectively observed, "The efficacy of conditional transfers (CCTs) in addressing a social policy objective has been demonstrated in the case of the government's 'Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program' (4Ps). A 2015 study by the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) showed the efficacy of the 4Ps program in increasing school participation rates among children aged 6 to 14 by 3.0 percentage points, enabling around 100,000 children to finish at least elementary level education. Another PIDS study indicated that the CCT program shows desirable impacts on most of the target education and health outcomes of children, pregnant women, and household welfare."
These studies by the nation's leading economic research body associated with the NEDA have confirmed the benefits of the CCT program. Policymakers in both the public and private sectors (i.e., business enterprises implementing Corporate Social Responsibility—CSR—programs and philanthropic NGOs) are well advised to improve the coverage of the country's social protection scheme, including CCTs, since this is crucial for achieving health and nutrition outcomes. Because of the Philippines' high poverty incidence (at 16% of the total population and can reach as high as 40% in some rural areas), there is a persistence of malnutrition, stunting, low utilization of child and maternal health services, and incidence of child labor, among others. Cash transfers can alleviate the food burden and nutrition problems of the poor and other vulnerable groups like people with disabilities (PWDs), small farmers and fisherfolk, and others.
The most important interventions are in nutrition and education, and, as explained above, the two can be intertwined because of the problem of stunting. The cost of malnutrition is staggering. There are estimates by experts that the Philippines had an annual economic loss of $4.5 billion or 1.5 percent of GDP in 2015 due to undernutrition and lagging nutrition programs. Future economic losses from undernutrition were estimated by UNICEF as follows: the future workforce lost due to child mortality amounted to $667 million annually; the future adult productivity deficit due to child cognitive and growth defects amounted to $233 million annually; and additional health utilization costs due to child morbidity amounted to $379 million annually.
Food insecurity hurts poor households especially. Even while the poor spend as much as 70 percent of their budget on food, problems of stunting, underweight, and wasting have persisted. High domestic food prices and low incomes create problems related to food affordability and accessibility, resulting in wasting and stunting in poor households. There is a glimmer of hope in the findings of the National Nutrition Survey that the prevalence of stunting among children under five years old had a moderate decline from 33.8 percent in 2003 to 28.8 percent in 2019. This, however, is what we call in Filipino-Spanish "consuelo de bobo" because in the ASEAN countries, the Philippines appears to fare the worst in terms of malnutrition and stunting.
This macroeconomic view of the problem of hunger in the Philippines, especially among children and the youth, should prompt private groups—businesses and civil society—to do everything possible to supplement the efforts of the Government to address the first track toward food security, i.e., emergency and short-term solutions to hunger among the poor, especially children. The low-hanging fruit can be found in the tons and tons of food—raw, cooked, or processed—which can come from the soon-to-expire food products of food manufacturing enterprises and food establishments like restaurants, hotels, and canteens. As Pope Francis said, it is a pity that these excess food items are thrown away more often than not. We need to establish many private organizations to combat this "throw-away" culture by developing and perfecting logistical approaches to delivering these excess food items to the undernourished and malnourished Filipinos, especially the children. In the Philippines, one such private initiative is the Philippine Food Bank Foundation (foodbank.org.ph; [email protected]).
For comments, my email address is [email protected].
