(Part 1)

All over the world, levels of hunger are expected to remain “shamefully” high according to United Nations (UN) officials in a recent report that predicts that almost 600 million people will be undernourished by 2030.

The report was issued by UN officials asking donor governments to rethink prioritizing national interests over foreign aid.  Despite the very high level of hunger, especially in Africa, UN estimates also show that official development assistance (ODA) is going down. Only about a quarter of that assistance ($77 billion) went to improving food security and nutrition in 2021, the most recent year for which there is data.

Unfortunately, in some of the donor countries, national interests are being prioritized over foreign aid (e.g., America First) leading to a cutback on foreign aid. Alvaro Lario, president of the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), told the Financial Times that there is a clear danger that there will be less resources available for tackling the global issue of food insecurity.

Worldwide, rates of hunger rose during the COVID-19 pandemic and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia. In 2023, between 712 million and 757 million people were facing hunger, according to the UN Report. While the number of people without enough to eat has declined in Latin America and the Caribbean and is relatively unchanged in Asia, it is continuing to rise in Africa. Overall, a higher portion of people are undernourished today than 10 years ago.

If the trend is not reversed, there will be 582 million people chronically undernourished by 2030. UN officials believe that the goal of zero hunger by 2030 could have been achieved with more funding from donor governments and better coordination. Often foreign aid is focused on emergency assistance, but more funds should have been channeled to help farmers improve their productivity.

According to the same UN study, food insecurity in the Philippines was among the worst within the Southeast Asian region during the period 2021 to 2023, with some 51 million Filipinos experiencing moderate or severe hunger or severe “food insecurity.” According to the UN, a person is considered food insecure if he or she lacks regular access to safe and nutritious food for normal growth and for an active and healthy life. The UN defines food security as a situation where all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary and food preferences.

The rate of moderate or severe food insecurity in the total population was 44.1% in the Philippines, the third highest in the region, after Timor-Leste (53.7%) and Cambodia (50.5%). The average cost of a healthy diet in the Philippines increased to $4.10 per person daily in 2022, higher than the $3.84 the year before. At this level, it became more expensive than the world average of $3.95 per person. All in all, the number of Filipinos who were not able to afford a healthy diet stood at 55.6 million in 2022 among a total population of some 115 million.

It was admirable for President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. not to gloat over the many reports from international agencies — like the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank as well as multinational banks and think tanks — that the Philippines is now, together with Vietnam and India, the fastest growing country GDP-wise, not only in the Indo-Pacific region but all over the world at about 6% per annum. He was quick to point out in his third State of the Nation Address (SONA) that such a high GDP growth is pointless because a large portion of the Philippine population continue to wallow in poverty and hunger. Indeed, on the Saturday after he delivered his SONA, prominent economist Mahar Mangahas reported in his regular column entitled “Social Climate” in a leading daily that the rate of hunger in the Philippine population is not only so high but is also rising quickly.

According to his Social Weather Station (SWS) — which was started in July 1998 — despite so much general economic growth, in terms of GDP per person, there has been no long-term decline in hunger, in contrast with self-rated poverty, which has declined slightly over the past four decades.

What is even more worrisome is that hunger happens to both the poor and the non-poor.

According to the SWS survey it is expectedly higher among the poor at any point of time. In June 2024, for instance, the hungry were 21.3% among the poor versus only 12.7% among the non-poor. Among the non-poor, the hunger rate fell momentarily, from 10.4% in September to 5.9% in December 2023. But then it rose to 9.8% in March 2024 and most recently to 12.7% in June 2024.

The surge of hunger among the non-poor is more recent and may be partly attributed to the high food inflation in the first semester of 2024, resulting from the drop in agricultural output that the extremely hot weather of El Niño brought with it.  Surveying hunger and poverty together has enabled the fluctuations of hunger among the poor and non-poor to be seen.  The relation of hunger to food poverty is even stronger.

Another correlation now universally recognized is that between hunger and malnutrition among children and education quality.

Educators, economists, and medical practitioners have repeatedly pointed out that it is impossible to address the educational outcomes in our public schools without the government addressing the problem of malnutrition affecting some 30% of early learners, as was pointed out by former Secretary of Education Edilberto de Jesus in a column of a prominent daily. In his words: “This is the silent, ticking time bomb serially crippling every generation that suffers through it.  Past a certain point, the malady permanently limits the children’s capacity to learn, aggravating the problem and raising its cumulative burden and costs. Investments in additional classrooms, curricular reform, and additional training and incentives for teachers are necessary, but they will not achieve the level of learning expected from children who go to school hungry.  Even the Divine Teacher had to perform the miraculous multiplication of loaves and fishes to make sure the people were properly fed before He began teaching them the Gospel values.”

We should appreciate the fact, therefore, that President Marcos Jr. spent the first 10 minutes or so of his SONA on the most serious economic problem of the Philippines today, i.e., food security and related issues of the high prices of food and hunger. As Alex Escucha, a fellow columnist in this paper and President of the Institute for Development and Econometric Analysis, Inc., pointed out in a recent column, the President however fell short of setting measurable goals. It is hoped that in his next SONA, he will heed the advice of Alex to come out, for example, with the following metrics as regards the serious problem of the stunting of children because of undernourishment and malnutrition: “Accelerate the target to cut the rate of stunting (of children) from 26.7% in 2021 to 5% by 2030, instead of 17.9% in the 2023-2028 Philippine Development Plan (page 87).”

This setting of measurable goals will also help concerned citizens in the business sector and civil society to identify their respective roles in fighting hunger in the Philippines, especially among children. It is clear that the Government cannot attain the goal of Zero Hunger alone.

(To be continued.)

Bernardo M. Villegas has a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard, is professor emeritus at the University of Asia and the Pacific, and a visiting professor at the IESE Business School in Barcelona, Spain. He was a member of the 1986 Constitutional Commission.

bernardo.villegas@uap.asia