Misunderstanding malnutrition in PH

Many people have written about why the Philippines’ economy is bad, and why it has not developed significantly for around five decades now.

The Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) has written extensively about development issues in the health sector. One of the big topics of discussion is stunting in children. Stunting is a short way to refer to stunted growth, usually defined as impaired growth and development, particularly in height. Stunted height is directly related to malnutrition. This is not to say that entire populations that are shorter than a theoretical height are all stunted, rather it means stunted height relative to the norm for the age in the population.

A study by PIDS senior research fellow Valerie Gilbert Ulep showed that the Philippines has some of the most severe stunting issues in the entire world, with 29 percent of children under five years old stunted. This is compared to a 13-percent average for upper middle-income countries. The Philippines is lower middle-income and here we can already see a correlation that points out: access to nutrition is a strong determinant of human capital and is a predictor of economic productivity.

To put the dire situation of the Philippines in perspective compared to its peers, many countries in the same income bracket have managed to lower percentages of stunting. Vietnam, for example, has lowered stunting by 5-6 percent per year over the past three decades. The Philippines has managed 0-1 percent in the same time frame. The Philippines has worse levels of stunting than even Cambodia and Myanmar despite those countries being poorer.

Stunting is predictive of poorer cognitive function and poorer educational outcomes. This is an issue where Filipinos literally cannot reach their full cognitive potential because of poor economic policy. Malnutrition is an issue of bad governance.

In fact, famines are never really caused by natural disasters or are naturally occurring in human populations; it is always state interactions that cause this. One of the root causes of malnutrition in the Philippines is the lack of an agricultural development plan. There has never been a real land reform policy in the Philippines. As James Putzel has discussed, Cory Aquino’s government implemented the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law in 1988 (at a time when only 5 percent of families owned 83 percent of farmlands). As it turns out, this is a misnomer of a law because it was far from comprehensive. Aquino herself made sure to carve out loopholes for oligarchs to maintain strangleholds on the land’s resources, including for her own family, the Cojuangcos. There was never any redistribution from private holders. To this day, the vast majority of farmers are sharecroppers who do not own their land and do not possess any real wealth. This lack of wealth and resources on its own results in malnutrition, but there is more to it.

The Philippines, as the Philippine Rice Research Institute has written, is a net importer of rice. This is insane for a country that is still almost entirely rural in land makeup. The Philippines has a very weak agricultural sector, meaning rice imports, fruit imports, and vegetable imports are the norm and highly expensive. This highly expensive food puts a normal, healthy, and necessary diet out of reach for most Filipinos, which leads to nearly one-third of Filipino children being stunted.

The solution by the state was to increase imports of rice. But rice on its own is only good for calories, and malnutrition is not only about calories, it is about nutrients, which Filipinos are disturbingly deficient in. What’s more, imports are not the long-term solution. The Philippines needs to produce its own food for well-rounded diets to be more accessible. Additionally, for the upper classes, this high rice and meat diet will result in diabetes, and the Philippines has seen a spike in that among upper classes in recent years. This is also malnutrition.

Malnutrition is fundamentally an issue of agricultural and development policy. We will never see the numbers decrease because of increasing imports. Rather, the government needs to make huge changes in agriculture for the future of Filipino health.

Sterling V. Herrera Shaw received his master’s degree in Philippine Studies from the University of the Philippines Diliman, where he specialized in sociocultural and development studies.