Despite the presence of conflict for two decades, the Philippines managed to cut its undernourished population to 13.9 million in 2016, from 14.1 million in 2014, according to the latest report of the United Nations’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
In its report, titled “The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World: Building Resilience for Peace and Food Security”, FAO noted that the Philippines is among the 14 countries affected by conflict to achieve the Millenium Development Goal (MDG) of reducing the number of people suffering from hunger by half, or commonly known as MDG 1c.
“Countries that have recently been relatively free of conflict and/or experienced low-intensity, localized conflict made the greatest progress,” FAO said in the report published in Rome recently.
“Only 14 of the 46 countries affected by conflict achieved the MDG 1c target, of which, eight have been relatively free of civil conflict in recent years [the Philippines, Angola, Cambodia, Georgia, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Nepal and Uzbekistan] or experienced very localized low-intensity conflict [the Philippines],” FAO added.
The FAO study noted that the Arroyo administration’s Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program could have helped in reducing the number of conflict-related incidents that posed threats to the country’s food security.
“A recent study in the Philippines offers experimental evidence of conditional-cash transfers leading to a substantial decrease in conflict-related incidents in treatment villages relative to control villages,” the study read.
“The Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program was also found to have reduced insurgent influence in the villages involved, although it cannot be excluded that this could also have been the result of insurgents shifting their focus of activity to controlling villages,” the study added.
The FAO study noted that the prevalence of the undernourishment in the Philippines’s total population in 2014 to 2016 declined to 13.8 percent, from a 16.3-percent prevalence from 2004 to 2006.
FAO defined undernourishment as “the outcome of poor nutritional intake in terms of quantity and/or quality and/or poor absorption and/or poor biological use of nutrients consumed as a result of repeated disease”.
“It includes being underweight for one’s age, too short for one’s age [stunted], dangerously thin for one’s height [wasted] and deficient in vitamins and minerals [micronutrient malnutrition],” the study added.
FAO data showed that the prevalence of wasting in children under 5 years of age in 2016 was pegged at 7.9 percent, or about 900,000 kids.
Meanwhile, the Philippines’s prevalence of stunted children under 5 years of age decreased to 30.3 percent in 2016, or about 3.3 million kids, from 33.8 percent rate in 2005 (3.8 million children), according to FAO.
The number of Filipino women in reproductive age (15 to 49 years old) suffering from anemia, or iron deficiency, in 2016 declined by 34.37 percent to 4.2 million, from 6.4 million recorded in 2005. FAO said the prevalence of anemia among Filipino women in the country was pegged at 15.7 percent in 2016, compared to the 29.3 percent rate in 2005.
However, the FAO study noted the number of overweight children (under 5 years of age) in the Philippines grew more than double in 2016 to 600,000, from the recorded 300,000 in 2005. The FAO study added the this translated to a 5-percent overweight prevalence rate among Filipino children under 5 years of age in 2016, higher than the 2.4- percent prevalence rate in 2005.
Data from the FAO study also showed that the prevalence of obesity in the adult Filipino population, aged 18 years and older, grew in 2016 to 5.2 percent, from the recorded prevalence rate in 2005 of 3.2 percent. This translated to some 3.1 million adult Filipinos being obese last year, which was more than double of the 1.5 million recorded obese adult Filipinos in 2005.
The FAO defined conflict as “struggles between interdependent groups that have either actual or perceived incompatibilities with respect to needs, values, goals, resources or intentions.”
“This definition includes [but is broader than] armed conflict—that is organized collective violent confrontations between at least two groups, either state or non-state actors,” it said.
“This report focuses on conflicts that threaten or entail violence or destruction, including where fragility raises the risk of damaging conflicts and where protracted crises persist,” it added.
Meanwhile, FAO classified nations that are under conflict as to those “low- and middle-income countries and territories affected by conflict for at least one subperiod of five consecutive years and having suffered 500 or more battle deaths during that sub-period.”
The timeframe spans from 1996 to 2015, with four periods of five years: 1996 to 2000; 2001 to 2005; 2006 to 2010; 2011 to 2015.
The study noted the Philippines recorded more than 500 battle-related deaths during the four periods. It was grouped along with 45 other countries that are considered affected by conflict, such Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Syrian Arab Republic, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen among others.