Editorial - If more are hungry, what happened to the cash doles?

According to the Social Weather Stations, in a survey conducted on the first week of last September, the estimated number of families that experienced real hunger grew from about three million to about 4.3 million since the last similar survey was made in June.

By real hunger is meant having experienced not having anything to eat at any time within the three months between the two survey dates. The 4.3 million families who experienced hunger make up over 20 percent — or one out of five — of all families nationwide.

And things are not expected to get any better for these families. As the country moves into its notoriously long Christmas season, it is not holiday cheers that will greet these hungry families but more hunger as prices traditionally soar at this time. 

But the most striking realization derived from looking at this bleak picture is the fact that the billions of pesos in cash doleouts that this government naively thought would make lives a little bit better for the poor have apparently failed to do precisely that.

The billions of pesos in cash given away by government to the poor have not made so much as even an insignificant dent on the miserable lives of the poor if they continue to experience real hunger.

Worse, their numbers have actually grown, giving rise to fears that even more money that could have been better spent elsewhere will needlessly be lost if government insists on pursuing this ill-advised initiative.

Had the initiative worked, the billions of pesos poured into the project should have been manifested in the survey results as a marked drop in the number of families who experienced real hunger.

For the target beneficiaries of the billions of pesos in cash doleouts are the very same people reflected in the surveys. If they still went hungry despite the cash doleouts, either they spent the money on something else other than food, or they never got the money at all.

Regardless of where the money went, which this government needs to investigate, it is very clear that any further erosion of the country’s precious resources must be stopped. This government must learn to look at the facts and not be distracted by the fiction.