Slower birth rate yet worse hunger

A population slowdown from 2.36 percent in the ’90s to 2.1 percent in the past five years should bring cheer. More so since last year’s notable 1.95 percent was so close to the government target of 1.9 percent. But what ruins the mood of economists is a related finding that families going hungry grew from 2.54 million in 2005 to 2.8 million today.

The incongruous figures tell what’s terribly wrong. There are less new mouths to feed; yet society simply cannot sustain the already born. Last year’s GDP spread of 6.1 percent was insufficient to nurture everyone.

The figures also reinforce sad facts. In its "2005 Key Indicators" the Asian Development Bank found one of every three Filipinos to be poor. The poorest families go hungry, the World Bank detailed, because they survive on only $1 (P50 or so) a day. Unimaginable? The image was brought to life in a recent TV newscast of a father and pre-teen son lunching from work in a coconut plantation. Their meal consisted of a plate of rice made tasty but not nutritious by a bowl of instant noodles.

Many factors can be blamed for the hunger. Local agriculture, though one of Southeast Asia’s fastest growing, does not yield plentiful food to pull prices down. Fuel price spikes eat into already unstable incomes. Wealth stays clustered on a few. Tax collections fall short of government needs to care for the poor. (Rep. Joey Salceda in fact complains that, despite the reformed value-added tax, professionals pay less while salary men get hit.) Corruption sucks up a good part of state revenues.

The Arroyo administration pops an immediate answer to hunger. It will quintuple from 200 to 1,000 the number of rolling stores that sell rice and groceries at reduced prices.

But that can only do so much. Ernesto Herrera, labor leader and ex-senator, restates what economists have long been saying: "Jobs are the only real solution to hunger."

The reason is clear. Jobs mean incomes, and income means money to buy food. "The severe lack of jobs is why an increasing number of marginal families are going hungry more often than before," Herrera says. "Without gainful employment, borderline families have no income; they are bound to go hungry."

Joblessness has festered far too long. For 12 years, unemployment hovered at 10 percent. That’s four million of the 40-million work force by today’s figures. Underemployment has always been at 25 percent, or ten million today. Were jobs not available overseas, another eight million Filipinos would be workless. It’s wrong policy though to export people instead of products.

Herrera stresses the need for a national employment plan. The key is to encourage labor-intensive private investments and public projects, along with brisker food production.

But it’s a chicken-and-egg situation. There simply are too many poor. Salaries are unsteady. Most talented Filipinos nurse the sick in America, entertain in Japan, baby-sit in Hong Kong, mine the oilfields in Arabia, and run all ships in the seven seas. In short, they enrich other countries but not the homeland. The result is an average national savings rate of only 18 percent of GDP, only half of the 35 percent needed for a country to start building factories and opening shops for full employment.

Low incomes mean low tax takes. Government revenues are too little to go full blast on public works. At about P650 billion a year, it covers only the salaries and operating expenses of all agencies. Funds for capital outlay must be borrowed. Since government has been borrowing the differential for decades, it borrows even more to repay old debts. The tendency is thus to limit national budget increases to only four percent a year. For five years now, only a tenth or so of the budget goes to infrastructures.

How to break the vicious cycle then? Herrera’s fellows in the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines propose a deletion of all economic items in the Constitution that are hostile to foreign investors. With that, president Democrito Mendoza and spokesman Alex Aguilar say, foreigners can come in to fill the gap between an 18-percent local savings rate and the 35 percent needed to jumpstart factories and shops.

Economist Bernardo Villegas, a framer of the 1987 Charter, agrees. Investments can pour not only into private industries. Public works too can kick up through build-operate-transfer deals. Jobs will be created; incomes will be earned; hunger will be stopped.

Catholic bishops call for all-out war against hunger through sharing. Lay leaders explain that charity is not only giving alms to the poor, but also devoting one’s waking hours to easing their plight. Perhaps Villegas’s anti-hunger advocacy, as member of the Papal-loyalist Opus Dei, is a way to heed Benedict XVI’s encyclical on charity as the practice of Christian love.

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