poverty in philipines..

I have been acutely aware of the relationship between poverty and hunger since my first trip here in 1982. As a statistical programmer cum development economist on a USAID-funded project based at Cornell, I came to Manila to analyze data from a national nutrition survey. The survey, conducted by the National Nutrition Council (NNC), provided the basis for targeting food and nutrition services designed for mothers and children in the most impoverished parts of the archipelago.

Although the work I did was both technologically primitive and abstract - tabulations painstakingly extracted from a Fujitsu computer using an ancient Fortran compiler and hand-drawn maps with stick-pins and annotations showing malnutrition prevalence rates - it was also a real eye-opener for me. While I had studied political and economic development at a theoretical level for years, those endeavors had been intellectualized and idealistic. In the process of analyzing that real world nutrition data, I came to appreciate the existential reality that underdevelopment and poverty are more than concepts in a book - they are directly related to starvation, illness, and human degradation.

Thus, I found it sad that when I returned here in 1998, the situation, while somewhat improved, was still not that good. When I again analyzed data on a nutrition study, this time for UNICEF, the numbers were still appalling. Still just numbers spit out by a computer, but still numbers reflecting real human suffering.

The NNC, the same organization I worked with so long ago, recently developed a Philippine Nutrition Country Profile with funding from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Findings showed that, just like 20 years ago, the biggest problems are protein-energy malnutrition (PEM) and micronutrient deficiencies. Paralleling the general trend in poverty statistics, there was a decline in the prevalence of malnutrition during mid-1990s, followed by gradual increases beginning in 1998. There are now approximately 4 million (32%) preschool children who are underweight-for-age, 3 million (20%) adolescents who are underweight-for-age, and 5 million (13.2%) adults who are chronically energy deficient. Vitamin A deficiency is a serious problem, with 7% of pregnant women and 8% of infants under six months being severely deficient. Iron deficiency anemia affects 57% of infants, 51% of pregnant women, and 46% of lactating women.

The primary cause of malnutrition is the inequitable distribution of food, which is related of course to poverty. The typical Filipino diet is grossly inadequate for energy and other nutrients, causing human bodies to compensate for inadequate energy intake by utilizing protein as an energy source; the usual result is PEM. This situation is unlikely to improve as long as an estimated 28 million Filipinos are unable to buy food to meet basic nutritional requirements.