SENATORIAL candidates Rep. Arlene Brosas (PL, Gabriela Women’s Party) and labor leader Leody de Guzman yesterday called on the national government to take drastic actions to address the rise in the incidence of involuntary hunger among poorer Filipino households.
Based on the most recent results released by the Social Weather Stations, 27.2 percent of respondents in its survey said their families experienced hunger at least once in the last three months, a marked increase from 21.2 percent in February and 15.9 percent in January.
Brosas said the number was both “shocking and alarming” since it is the women and children who are the most affected when a family experience food shortage.
De Guzman said 27.2 percent translates to around 7.5 million households that are not earning enough to feed themselves – the most basic of needs.
“What makes the situation more disturbing is that this is happening in the midst of hundreds of billions that the government is pouring into all sorts of cash assistance each year, not counting the subsidies on medical and burial expenses as well as scholarship programs from different agencies of the government,” he pointed out.
The Partido Lakas ng Masa (PLM) senatorial candidate said the tangle of financial policies has made it nearly impossible to gauge the efficiency of cash assistance programs even as measures are being enacted that deprive Filipino workers of their buying power.
He cited the TRAIN law, Rice Tariffication Law, Oil Deregulation Law, the Electric Power Industry Reform Act (EPIRA), Automatic Appropriations Law, regional wage fixing mechanisms, and laws legitimizing manpower agencies as among measures that take away from the shrinking wages of daily wage earners.
“What Congress needs to do is abolish or amend these laws to make the cost of living more manageable for the poor Filipino families. If we really want to wipe out hunger incidence, there should be a law for automatic adjustment of wages coupled with price control both based on the inflation rate,” De Guzman said.
Brosas warned that prolonged food insufficiency will result in stunting of millions of children in affected families.
“Hunger today means stunted future for our children. The rising hunger rate will inevitably worsen our already critical child malnutrition problem, with long-term consequences for the nation’s health and productivity,” she said.
As an immediate response, she recommended the scrapping of value-added tax on all basic food items and the approval of a P1,200 national minimum wage to erase hunger incidence promptly.
