Heeding economic suffering

According to the Social Weather Stations survey of March 27-30, 2014, 17.8 percent of families nationwide experienced involuntary hunger at least once in the past three months (see “Hunger among families little changed,” BusinessWorld, 5/12/2014). This is slightly less than the 18.1 percent hunger rate found by the previous SWS national survey in December 2013.

The quarterly hunger report of SWS is based on how household heads answer the question:

“Nitong nakaraang tatlong buwan, nangyari po ba kahit minsan na ang inyong pamilya ay nakaranas ng gutom at wala kayong makain? In the last three months, did it happen even once that your family experienced hunger and not have anything to eat?”  Those who answer Yes to the basic question are then asked if it happened only once (minsan lamang), a few times (mga ilang beses), often (madalas) or always (palagi). The first two answers make up “moderate hunger,” and the second two answers make up “severe hunger.” Moderate hunger and severe hunger were 15.0 percent and 2.8 percent, respectively, as of March 2014.

Truthfulness. The BW write-up was quite careless to describe the number as those “claiming to have experienced nothing to eat in the past three months.” If this were literally true, then the survey interviewer would have encountered no one, since everyone would already have starved to death.

What is more disturbing, however, is the habitual reference to survey answers as “claims,” without citing a reason for doubt.  When the subject matter is the respondents’ own economic suffering, it is not merely thoughtless, but even cruel, to cast gratuitous doubts on their truthfulness.

All surveys, private or official, depend on the truthfulness of respondents for their validity.  Thus, responsible survey practitioners see to it that the respondents have no cause to expect any reward or any penalty, for any response.  The responses must all be recorded correctly.  The anonymity of all respondents must be sacred.

Hunger does change. One should go beyond the headlines. The reason that hunger was stable at the national level, between December 2013 and March 2014, was because of subnational changes that offset each other.

Most notable of all was the change in the National Capital Region (NCR), where family hunger was cut in half—from 24.3 percent last December to 12.0 percent last March. Both moderate hunger and severe hunger were halved; moderate hunger went from 18.3 to 9.0, and severe hunger went from 6.0 to 3.0.

(The reason national hunger was hardly affected by the cut in the NCR was because it rose in the Balance of Luzon by 4.3 points—from 15.7 percent to 20.0 percent. This was enough to offset the NCR’s change, since the Balance of Luzon has a very large weight.  Hunger fell only slightly in the Visayas, by 0.8 points, and in Mindanao, by 1.7 points.)

The 12-point quarterly change in the NCR is not a statistical fiction, since its error margin is plus/minus six points.  The last time hunger in the NCR was this low was nine years ago, in May 2005.  Its all-time record low was 3.4 percent in March 2004, from the time the SWS quarterly time-series started in July 1998 to the present.

It is important to learn why hunger dropped so much in the first quarter in the NCR, so as to keep it down, if not lower it further.  First, one should accept that it happened.  I think the government has grown complacent from its official figures—based on highly unrealistic poverty lines—that already put poverty in the NCR at only 2.5 percent, and food-poverty at a miniscule 0.4 percent, in 2012. Is it true that poverty has virtually disappeared in Metro Manila?  Official agencies have the unscientific habit of only heeding official figures.

The newest official report, of last April 29, says that official poverty dropped between the first half of 2012 and the first half of 2013.  It gives only national-level figures, on the excuse that the national sample of some 10,000 households is “too small” for more details.  But it is already passé. In particular, there are still no official statistics on what Supertyphoon “Yolanda” did to poverty (for SWS figures, see “Poverty, hunger and ‘Yolanda,’” Opinion, 1/25/2014).

Hunger in relation to poverty. There is always more hunger among the poor, of course, but the relationship is not fixed. In March 2014, hunger was 27.5 percent among families of the self-rated poor, or four times as widespread as the 7.1 percent among other families.

Yet, in December 2013, the hunger percentage had been 24.5 among the self-rated poor, or only two and a half times as widespread as the 10.3 among other families.  This shows that the vulnerability of the poor to hunger grew worse in early 2014.  Does the government know it?

How the government could see for itself. If it really wanted to, the government could generate poverty and hunger statistics, together, on a quarterly basis, using the Labor Force Surveys; but it is fixated on basing such estimates on income, which takes too much questionnaire space.  Or else, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas could use its quarterly national Consumer Confidence Surveys; but the BSP, fixated on financial flows, is only interested in workers’ remittances.

I think a major reason the government doesn’t heed economic suffering is that it is so enamored of the language of money.  It prefers the complicated process of asking people about the pesos and centavos of their income and expenditures, to asking them directly, and simply, if they are poor and hungry.

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Contact mahar.mangahas@sws.org.ph.