Last Monday’s new Social Weather Stations (SWS) report on hunger, showing a decline to 15.5 percent as surveyed in February 2009 from the record-high 23.7 percent as surveyed in December 2008, was quickly cited by Press Secretary Cerge Remonde as evidence that the administration’s anti-hunger programs are effective.
“We hope this [hunger] trend continues because putting food on the tables of the poorest Filipino families is the priority of the President,” he said, according to BusinessWorld newspaper that day.
At the risk of being called a party-pooper, I must point out that a single movement, in any direction, cannot be called a “trend.” It takes at least two consecutive movements in the same direction to define a trend.
The precise thing to say is that the previous quarterly trend of three upward movements, from 15.7 percent in March 2008 to 16.3 percent in June 2008, and then to 18.4 percent in September 2008, and then to 23.7 percent in December 2008, has just been broken. This break is of course a good thing. However, it needs to be reinforced, and not just for one more quarter, but over most if not all the quarters to come.
That upward trend in 2008 was, incidentally, preceded by two drops in the hunger percentage, first from 21.5 in September 2007 to 16.2 in December 2007, and then to 15.7 in March 2008. Thus those two successive drops in hunger, barely qualified to be called a “trend,” turned out to be no basis for celebration.
It’s essential to keep in mind the entire series of hunger surveys. From July 1998 to February 2009, there have been 44 quarterly SWS surveys of involuntary hunger in the Philippines, with separate geographical figures for the National Capital Region, the Balance of Luzon, the Visayas, and Mindanao. The statistical methodology of these SWS surveys has been consistently maintained over time. These SWS survey findings, whether favorable or unfavorable, are promptly reported to the public. Compared to the Philippines, no other country in the world, to my knowledge, has an equally rapid survey system for tracking hunger.
The exceptionally high hunger in recent years is acknowledged by those analysts — for instance, University of the Philippines School of Economics professors Dante Canlas, Benjamin Diokno and Felipe Medalla, who presented a “Philippine Road Map” to the business community last Wednesday — who are open to all sources of statistics, whether governmental or not. However, it is being ignored by government analysts, as though they are under instruction to make use of official statistics only, even if such statistics are very weak in tracking hunger.
How has hunger actually moved in the past decade? In 1998-2003, hunger fell to a certain extent, but starting 2004 its trend was upward. Here are the annual averages of the SWS quarterly percentages of households that experienced involuntary hunger within the previous three months:
The overall average of 12.6 percent is a rough measure of the “hunger climate” from 1998 to the present. The year-to-year percentages, on the other hand, refer to the “hunger weather.”
In every year up to 2004 the hunger weather was below-average. However, in every year starting 2005 the hunger weather was above-average. Thus there has been an unfavorable “climate change” during the past five years. Reversing this change requires radical changes in the policy and governance environment from what was in place during 2005-2008.
The 15.5 percent hunger rate in the new survey of February 2009 is also above the 1998-2009 average, and so there is no reason to jump for joy at this time. What is needed is not only to identify and strengthen the most promising anti-hunger programs, but also to identify and eliminate the program failures that were probably responsible for the unfavorable change in hunger climate in the first place. To be truly entitled to take credit for good times, one should also assume responsibility for bad times.
More specifically, the most promising anti-hunger program appears to be the Conditional Cash Transfers (CCT), since these are individually targeted on the poor. The appropriate monitoring and evaluation devices for this program should be applied unstintingly. On the other hand, my initial guess as to the least effective anti-hunger program is the rice importation program, which may have been four times as costly as the CCT in 2008. Which agency can be more trusted to reduce hunger: the Department of Social Welfare and Development or the Department of Agriculture?
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The “Philippine Midterm Progress Report on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs),” published by the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) in 2007, uses no SWS data whatsoever.
Since the government lacks its own direct measures of hunger, the report resorts to proxy indicators: (a) the percentage of underweight children aged five years or less — which was 34.5 circa 1990 and 24.6 in “current year” 2005, and (b) the percentage of households with per capita intake below the full dietary requirement for energy — 69.4 circa 1990 and 56.9 in 2003. The source of the proxies is the infrequently run National Nutrition Survey. The Report’s claim of a “high” probability of meeting the goal of halving hunger by 2015 from its level in 1990 is ignorant of the change in the hunger climate since 2005.
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Contact SWS: www.sws.org.ph or mahar.mangahas@sws.org.ph
