MANY were surprised, others were enraged, when the secretary of National Economic Development Authority (NEDA) announced that according to official reckoning, Filipinos who can spend P64 a day for the basic three meals are not considered “food poor.”
The figure presupposes that one spends a little more than P21.3 per meal to be considered a citizen with enough food on the table.
Secretary Arsenio Balisacan of course based his statement on the government’s official metrics to measure poverty. These numbers came from various offices in his department, perhaps including inputs from other agencies that have something to do with the economy, such as the inflation rate and the prices of basic commodities including food.
The problem with Balisacan’s statement is that even without an itemized computation of how a meal should cost, the fact that the price of rice is P50 or more per kilo already negates the official position. Fish, vegetables, meat, and other items needed to make three meals a day for a family of three or five just could not be covered by the amount P64 as mentioned by the NEDA chief.
`While Gadon’s ocular observation is true, this does not mean that President Bongbong Marcos has finally solved the problem of poverty in the Philippines…’
Construction and office workers in Metro Manila who depend on mobile carinderias for lunch will tell you that a cup of rice costs at least P15 and a simple viand costs P50 to P70, so that’s already a minimum of P65 out from their pockets. So from what part of Makati’s polluted air did Secretary Balisacan pulled his idea that P21.3 for a meal would suffice?
This latest pronouncement from the government’s premiere economist had social activists and left-leaning lawmakers calling out the NEDA in anger, and asking the secretary and his family to try surviving on P64 a day as food expenses.
The problem with official metrics to gauge the Filipinos’ poverty level is that these can be interpreted in many ways, something alike to the common belief that there are as many interpretations of the law as there are lawyers.
Not too long ago, Secretary Larry Gadon, presidential adviser for poverty alleviation, came out with a similar argument that most Filipinos are not poor because the malls and shopping centers are full of cars, motorcycles, shoppers and moviegoers.
While Gadon’s ocular observation is true, this does not mean that President Bongbong Marcos has finally solved the problem of poverty in the Philippines, as his physical monitoring was confined only in the National Capital Region where the malls are concentrated. If only Gadon would go to the hinterlands, or even to the still urbanizing parts of the provinces where both lowland and upland sustenance farming are practiced by the people, he will know what real poverty looks like. We are beginning to wonder what kind of advice Larry Gadon is giving the President to even try to solve this.
It comes as a whiff of fresh air that reacting to the furor that the NEDA statement has caused, the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) announced that the methodology for coming up with thresholds used by the government to determine poverty will be adjusted in 2025.
This is an admission that the current food threshold is deemed insufficient, and the government is ready to tweak its numbers.
