Hunger and unhappiness

ROME, SEPT. 14—This week’s “roundtable” on monitoring food security, held by the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) at the headquarters of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), was attended by a few hundred participants, almost all from international organizations and governments.

The few who spoke up to point out that there are also private institutions that do surveys relevant to food security were myself, a representative from the Gallup Organization, and a researcher from Unilever.  Social Weather Stations has been surveying hunger quarterly since 1998.  The Gallup World Poll of over 100 countries, done annually for four years now, includes items on families’ ability to afford the food they need.  (In the Philippines, SWS is Gallup’s fieldwork and data-encoding provider.)

In general, social surveys of “subjective” indicators are highly up-to-date as sources of information on food security, unlike the surveys of “objective” matters like food production, food consumption, and nutrition done by governments (which are in turn the sources of data compiled by international organizations like FAO).

Thus the SWS surveys have  become the de facto means of rapid hunger monitoring in the Philippines, since the government does its National Nutrition Surveys only every five years (the latest referring to 2008), and its Family Income and Expenditure Surveys only every three years (the latest referring to 2009), with their next reports not due for completion until 2014.

Governments and international organizations everywhere should heed the dictum of the 2009 Sarkozy Report that objective and subjective indicators are both important for measuring a nation’s well-being.  Indeed, subjective indicators have the critical capacity to alert the public about the immediacy of the people’s deprivations.

Improving well-being by reducing unhappiness.  It should be noted that the Millennium Development Goals, adopted worldwide in 2000, are quantifications of the promises of governments (including the Philippines) to prioritize the reduction of extreme poverty and multiple deprivations, over the enhancement of the well-being of those who are already free from them.  Their pledge was to reduce these deprivations by 50 percent of their levels in 1990, by 2015, i.e. by 2 percent per year over 25 years.

In MDG-ideology, reducing hunger (MDG1) has priority over making those free from it happier with their access to food.  Serving those who lack primary education (MDG2) has priority over serving those with more schooling.  Preventing deaths of children (MDG4) and women giving birth (MDG5) has priority over curing illnesses of adults.  And so on.

The MDGs are thus oriented, not towards reducing all forms of personal unhappiness, but towards reducing those forms due to unfortunate social circumstances that governments have taken the responsibility to remedy.  One of these is unhappiness due to hunger.

Hunger and unhappiness.  The June 2011 Social Weather Survey found that 2 percent of Philippine families suffered from hunger often or always (termed severe hunger), and 13 percent suffered it only once or a few times (termed moderate hunger), in the previous three months, on account of not having anything to eat. Eighty-five percent did not experience involuntary hunger in the past quarter.

There is a clear connection between involuntary hunger and unhappiness among Filipinos.

In June 2011, SWS also asked individual adults about happiness in their lives, and found about 84 percent responding “very happy” or else “fairly happy,” 13 percent saying “not very happy,” and 3 percent being “not at all happy.”

By international standards, we Filipinos are not the happiest of peoples, but merely somewhat above average.  I separated the percentages of the slightly unhappy and the deeply unhappy since these are important details.

Among respondents coming from families that did not experience involuntary hunger, 86 percent were very/fairly happy, 12 percent were not very happy, and 2 percent were not at all happy.  Thus only one out of fifty was deeply unhappy.

However, among those from families suffering moderate hunger, only 70 percent were very/fairly happy, whereas 22 percent were not very happy and 8 percent were not at all happy.  Thus deep unhappiness among the moderately hungry was four times as common as among families who were not hungry.

Finally, among those from families in severe hunger, only 63 percent were very/fairly happy, whereas 16 percent were not very happy, and 22 percent were not at all happy.  Thus one out of five was deeply unhappy.  Deep unhappiness among the severely hungry was 10 times as common as among families who were not hungry.  This tremendous social injustice should be rectified as soon as possible.

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The CFS, established in 1974, was originally an intergovernmental body to serve as a forum of the UN system on food security matters.  It was reformed in 2009 so as to widen participation, and now includes civil society organizations, which is how SWS got invited.  Its executive arm is a bureau currently chaired by Dr. Noel D. de Luna, the Philippine agricultural attaché in Rome; its secretariat is at FAO.  The Filipinos at the Sept. 12-13 CFS roundtable on monitoring food security, aside from myself, were Emma Fabian of the National Statistics Office, Dr. De Luna, and assistant agricultural attaché Esteban Pagaran .

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Contact SWS: www.sws.org.ph or mahar.mangahas@sws.org.ph.