EDITORIAL - Hungry and undernourished

You don’t need statistics to grasp the extent of undernourishment and hunger in this country. Just look at street children or go to any low-income community, and you will see people who are thin but with bloated bellies, sometimes with sallow skin and glazed eyes.

Hunger goes hand-in-hand with poverty, which is prevalent in our developing nation. The Food and Agriculture Organization, in its annual report on hunger, cited a drop in the percentage of hungry people in the Philippines, from 26 percent eight years ago to the current 23 percent. In actual numbers, however, there are more hungry Filipinos than ever. Due to population growth, that 23 percent is equivalent to 16.8 million people as of 1998 to 2000 – higher than the 16.3 million in 1990-1992. Among the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, only Cambodia is worse off than the Philippines in terms of undernourished people, the FAO reported. The Philippines is in the same bracket as Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar and Thailand.

The report, released in Washington on the occasion of World Food Day yesterday, said global efforts to reduce by half the number of hungry people by 2015 have slowed down so much that it could take a hundred years to achieve the goal. Since the World Food Summit in 1996, the number of hungry people in the developing world jumped by 50 million. Up to 840 million people worldwide are undernourished, according to FAO estimates.

It could take decades before a significant dent can be made against poverty in this country, which means hunger will also be around for a long time. The government has been trying to do something about improving nourishment. With the cooperation of the private sector, there are programs to address iodine deficiency. Food processing companies are encouraged to fortify their products with vitamins and nutrients needed especially by school-age children. Clearly, however, the nation still has a long way to go in terms of food security, and in reducing hunger and undernourishment.