While the well-to-do minority privileged households (“mga may kaya sa buhay”) are perhaps challenged daily by what succulent food to order and which fancy restaurants to eat at, the majority who are poor (“mga walang kaya”) are preoccupied solely with survival and intense hunger for food is a stark reality in their daily lives.
Mahar Mangahas’ column (“Reading the hunger numbers,” Social Climate, 11/25/23) highlights the importance of updating readers’ numerical awareness and understanding of poverty and hunger. Over time, his Social Weather Stations (SWS) has methodically collected context-specific and time-bound descriptive data. He thus helps policymakers design, monitor, and evaluate interventions for accurately improving the well-being of people experiencing poverty and hunger. Describing the truth of the facts (as Hannah Arendt would put it), their longitudinal research makes use of the facts to raise public awareness about unjust social conditions such as widespread poverty and involuntary hunger, especially for those who may be alienated from their social and cultural conditions beyond their cohort and context. Unfortunately, some tend to reduce their determinants to dispositional factors, forgetting or unaware that situational or structural factors are at play.
However, as things are moving, government programs to lessen widespread poverty and stubborn hunger have yet to achieve considerable progress since July 1998, when SWS first surveyed hunger incidence in the country. Interestingly, in their book “The World’s Most Deprived: Characteristics and Causes of Extreme Poverty and Hunger Vol. 43” (International Food Policy Research Institute, 2007), Akhter U. Ahmed et al. proposed structural interventions based on their identified determinants and along the following lines that are essential to helping the poorest move out of poverty and hunger: (i) improving access to markets and essential services for those in the most remote areas, (ii) providing insurance to help households deal with health crises, (iii) preventing child malnutrition, (iv) enabling investments in education and physical capital for those with few assets, and (v) addressing the exclusion of disadvantaged minority groups such as the Aetas and Mangyans in our midst.
As a highly religious country, there is a greater expectation from us, individually and collectively, not to look away but to regularly do social works of charity, at least in our neighborhoods where our less fortunate brothers and sisters persistently suffer from the pangs of hunger due to systemic poverty. Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who dedicated her life to the poorest of the poor and the hungriest of the hungry, once said, “If you cannot feed one hundred people, then feed just one.” The Gospel reading from Matthew 25:31-46 for the Feast of Christ the King this year reminds us that if we do it to the least among us, then we do it to and for God, who is most merciful and kind to those who are weakened by poverty and hunger.
Noel Asiones,
noelgasi2000@yahoo.com