Stunted

The numbers are stark. According to the DOST’s Food and Nutrition Research Institute, a third of Filipino children under the age of five is stunted due to chronic malnutrition.

A third of the next generation of Filipinos is severely handicapped for life. This staggering number will have serious learning limitations, live their lives in poorer health and have narrowed job opportunities. At every stage of life, they face numerous barriers.

This is a silent epidemic. It does not only ravage lives. This epidemic delimits the nation’s capacity to progress.

Yet there does not seem to be a government program of any breadth to deal with this epidemic. Stunting causes irreversible damage to health. The victims, however, do not form a noisy constituency. In the populist democracy we have, the noisy wheel gets the oil.

The World Health Organization (WHO) repeatedly called the attention of nations to the long-term problems caused by child stunting. But even at the international level, there does not appear to be a comprehensive program to combat child malnutrition.

A major study published in the respected journal The Lancet found that stunting can hold back national growth, reducing a country’s GDP by up to 10 percent. With a third of our children chronically malnourished, the Philippines should be among the nations most adversely affected by stunting.

During a recent budget hearing, Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano brought up the issue of stunting. He stressed the urgency of devising a comprehensive strategy to deal with chronic child malnutrition. Such a strategy should involve all of government. It cannot be suitably addressed by the current feeble efforts of disparate agencies acting from within their respective rabbit holes.

The problem of stunting has structural roots in widespread poverty, food insecurity and lack of access to health services. As our agriculture continues to fail and the longer we are forced to endure a high food price regime, chronic malnutrition is bound to worsen.

We cannot rely on short-term programs such as the distribution of “nutribuns” to schoolchildren. Even such a program is too little and too late. It misses children under five.

We have to rely on a comprehensive effort involving the private sector, hospitals and government agencies to educate young families about the critical importance of proper child nutrition, organizing feeding programs for preschool children and improving on our society’s food access.

I hope Alan Cayetano decides to make this his advocacy – because no one else will. He must not only push for budget allocations to address food deficiency. He must lead a broad effort to make nutrition accessible.

In the case of stunting, there is no time to lose.

Wetlands

There continues to be resistance to the proposal to reclaim land off the shorelines of Las Piñas and Parañaque that promises to add hundreds of hectares of highly developed urban land to the two cities.

One major contention is that the giant P103.8-billion reclamation project would harm the designated wetlands adjacent to the project site. The Las Piñas-Parañaque Critical Habitat and Ecotourism Area (LPPCHEA) currently hosts a bird sanctuary – although some fear the presence of so many bird species impacts the safety of the nearby airport.

For its part, Alltech Contractors Inc., the lone proponent of the reclamation project, commissioned several scientific studies to assure the two cities the designated wetlands will not be harmed by the undertaking they propose. The scientific studies, reviewed by magistrates at the Supreme Court, have yet to impress environmentalists seeking to keep the shoreline in its raw state.

This proposed project may well be a textbook case for how slowly development happens in this country.

The Alltech project was first proposed in 2009. It involves the reclamation of 381.26 hectares for Las Piñas and 174.88 hectares for Parañaque. The new land will substantially increase commercial space for the two congested cities.

Whatever the promised economic windfall from this project, those who oppose it brought the case to court. On Oct. 21, 2021, the Supreme Court en banc voting 11-2 cleared the way for the 530-hectare project to proceed. The magistrates found that supposed environmental threats posed by the project were not sufficiently established. Furthermore, the Expanded National Integrated Protected Areas System Act of 2018 (ENIPAS) does not prohibit reclamation activities in adjacent areas.

All that is left for this project to get going is an official notice to proceed from the Office of the President. That has transformed this issue from a juridical to a political one. There are influential political voices continuing to oppose the project, regardless of the scientific evidence showing reclamation will not harm the wetlands nor aggravate the flooding problem.

A commissioned study by Tricore Solution Inc. acknowledged that no portion of the proposed reclamation area traverses into the protected wetland. On the contrary, the reclamation could help protect the western side of the lagoon that is currently eroding.

A small portion of the wetlands, however, could be used in the event the proposed 160-meter wide Parañaque River channel is built. Engineering studies conducted demonstrate that the reclamation project could in fact help relieve the area’s flooding problems.

Since the issue has become political, it has also become electoral, as the mid-term polls are just around the corner.