Extra Rice, Please!

I hate that feeling of emptiness in the tummy department, that incessant grumbling that gets worse as the delicious scent of grilled burger patties wafts slowly into our classroom just as all of us are trying so hard to make it through the next half of our class. The grumbling and the scent are enough to veer my mind away from why Rizal wrote the Noli and why it all mattered in history, to thoughts of devouring burger upon burger to quell the hunger.

Hunger isn’t much of a problem for the lot of us who are born into comfortable lifestyles. In fact, there are many of us who can’t imagine not eating at least six times a day—three times would be torture unless you are oh-so serious about your diet. We devour gelatos, huge slices of pizza smothered with mozzarella, foot-long hotdogs, crepes, and whatever suits our foodie fancy to the point that we sometimes doubt if hunger is really a problem the world over. We wonder because we don’t feel it.

In a recent trip to more depressed areas in the country, to the slums and to highly agricultural provinces, I found out that it’s a horrible fact to face for many whose stories are only been heard collectively before they are shoved into just another bunch of figures in statistics. In various places in the Philippines and in other developing countries, hunger is a force to reckon with, a monster to wrestle with everyday. Hey, some people eat only once a day (You can swallow your gelato now).

Before you drop your quarter pound burger to save the Philippines from hunger before bed time, it’s important for us to set the facts straight—to rid ourselves of common hunger myths so our efforts will not go straight to the trash bin.

A friend of mine told me right after a short lecture on the Millennium Development Goals that the reason that hunger was widespread in the country and all over the world was because there just wasn’t enough food to go around. Actually, according to the book World Hunger: Twelve Myths, there is more than enough food to make everyone the world over fat. Many developing countries are exporters of agricultural products, growing more than enough yield to feed the rest of the population however, the problem is that their farmers and a huge majority of the population are too poor to even buy the food that they grow in their backyards.

Typhoons, floods, and even the El Niño are convenient scapegoats in the blame game but really, the real culprit here are the man-made forces the hinder many of the country’s and the world’s poorest from stocking for everyday use. World Hunger asserts “The real culprits are an economy that fails to offer everyone opportunities, and a society that places economic efficiency over compassion.”

The typical scenario for many developing countries is that jobs, healthcare, education, land, and so many other facilities are controlled and hoarded by the powerful few instead of being distributed to the grassroots in order to pull them out of poverty. Many of these basic social necessities are usually beyond the reach of the common tao who, by the way, are the ones who need it the most.

Remember that thing about land reform that we used to talk about in our political science classes? Well, it’s not just a thing for the textbooks, mind you. That 10% of the population who own 90% of the land often leave much of it idle. Contrast that with the case of northeast Brazil where land is being redistributed in small parcels to the local farmers. The World Bank study has found out that small farmers are able to produce greater yields per hectare primarily because they “work their land more intensively and use integrated, and often more sustainable, production systems.” The Brazil case alone raised output to an impressive 80%. Talk about putting food on the table.

More often, battling hunger requires teamwork between the government and the private sector and it requires us young people who rally against hunger to remove the roadblocks to hunger for those who incessantly fight it. The government can work to ensure that the peso will have a greater buying power—and that this capability is widespread even to those at the lower rungs of the economic ladder. Only then will the market’s innovations in food be enjoyed by many.

Hunger is a reality that even our generation must start to act against. Sooner and not later. It’s easy to put this off because of our ability to chomp down steaks and fried chicken whenever but seriously, what they feel way over there, will sooner catch up with the rest of us over here.

Gosh, all this talk about hunger is definitely making me hungry.