The significance of the problem of food insecurity was highlighted when the German ambassador to the Philippines, Her Excellency Anke Reiffenstuel and President-elect Bongbong Marcos discussed the subject during the former’s courtesy call to the incoming president. They agreed that food security shall be given priority in the Marcos administration and acknowledged the significance of the upcoming international ministerial conference on food security to be hosted by the UK on July 28-29, 2022.
The conference will bring together academics, researchers, scientists and leaders from the government and private sectors to share and report their experiences and studies on sustainable agriculture and efforts to promote food security. This international forum reflects the urgency of addressing this major concern that threatens the survival of millions of people around the world, making food insecurity the next pandemic. Sustainable agriculture, food security and nutrition will be the defining issues confronting all governments, rich or poor, in the coming years. Even the US, the land of milk and honey, has recently suffered from a critical shortage of infant milk, which required Nestlé SA to airlift baby formula from Europe to the US. Famine is everyday news in most countries in Africa, which is caused by poverty, extreme weather, unaffordable costs of food and political strife. And food security is fast becoming a worldwide problem. Global food crisis is becoming a reality due to the war in Ukraine, which is considered the breadbasket of Europe and the rest of the world, climate change, and the raging inflation that drives up the cost of food.
The Philippines, despite being blessed with rich natural resources, reels from food scarcity. The Social Weather Stations has reported that over a tenth of all Filipinos, or about 2.5 million families, had suffered from involuntary hunger during the last quarter of 2021. This is better than the hunger rate posted in May 2021 at 16.8 percent. Overall, the country has a hunger rate of 13.1 percent in 2021 versus the 21.1 percent recorded in 2020, the height of the Covid-19 crisis where considerable workers lost their jobs. Food security will be a major headache to the incoming administration. President-elect BBM will need a miracle to attain rice sufficiency or reduce the price of rice to make it affordable to ordinary Filipinos. Instead of importing “galunggong,” which are caught in Philippine waters by foreign poachers, our fishermen should produce enough yields to feed our starving countrymen. Importation and illegal smuggling of vegetables, which could be amply grown in our farms, should be restricted if not stopped, since they kill our own vegetable industry. Our own produce rot in the fields unharvested or unsold due to very low prices. Rural farmers who constitute our largest labor force will go hungry if they don’t earn from their work. President-elect BBM will face one of his biggest challenges in resolving food deficiency and hunger. His economic team of incoming Finance Secretary Ben Diokno and other veteran public servants who are considered experts in their respective fields will have their new jobs cut out for them. How they perform during the first six months of their term bears watching. Their efforts may be hampered by the debt burden and the continuing Covid-19 concerns, but the overwhelming mandate that President-elect BBM had received should give them the vision and the courage to undertake bold measures to put us right on track. By the way, whatever happened to the Inter-Agency Task Force on Zero Hunger, which President Rodrigo Duterte created in January this year to free more Filipinos from hunger and attain food security? The Task Force headed by Cabinet Secretary Karlo Nograles was supposed to “outline the government priorities and map efforts to achieve zero hunger.” The vice chairperson is Social Welfare Secretary Joselito Bautista, and the Task Force is backed by relevant cabinet officials such as the secretaries of Agriculture, Budget, Neda, Health, Labor and many others. Nothing much has been heard since its creation, but I trust that it has been working quietly without publicity. Whatever may be the case, it’s expected that it will turn over its work to its successor and render a report so that the people will know about the progress of its work. It’s great if some seminal works have been done, which will definitely help the incoming administration.
It should be noted that despite sustained economic growth before the pandemic hit us, the Philippines has regressed in terms of food security. The perennial problems of hunger and malnutrition have worsened. In fact, the 2020 Human Development Report by the UN Development Programme “ranked the country 197th out of 189.” Large portions of our population are chronically hungry. Many families do not earn enough income to buy adequate food. Extreme poverty drives people to beg or even scavenge for food, and many people, particularly children, die of hunger, malnutrition or famine. If they survive, they are malnourished and sickly, and suffer from diseases that render them incapable of normal living. Children have stunted growth, poor physical and mental capacities and are vulnerable to illnesses and abnormalities. They grow up only to become burdens of society. Malnutrition and acute food deficiency will add a strain to our overburdened health care system. They crowd our limited health-services and scarce medical facilities, which the government can ill afford.
It does not help that the Philippines ranked number 1 among the most vulnerable countries in the world when it comes to natural disasters. Severe weather conditions result in extreme events like droughts, floods, and extreme heat waves, which reduce agricultural yield and livestock production. Volcanic eruptions and destructive earthquakes have disrupted people’s economic lives and displaced our population. People who are evacuated to refugee centers don’t have sufficient food and adequate nutrition, and they are prone to sickness. Calamities are major disruptors that impact our economy and people’s livelihood. Crops are damaged and fishermen cannot go out to the sea to fish. This eventually results in food shortages and spike in prices, which ultimately cause social and civil unrest.
As Hillary Clinton has said, “food security is the issue of our time.” It’s a risk to all nations—rich and poor, big and small. It’s a very basic problem and despite advances in science and technology, we have not truly solved the problem of obtaining a balance between the exponential growth of population and the growth of food supply. Thomas Robert Malthus must be turning in his grave. Despite the early promise that food shortage will not come to pass, food production fails to keep up with population increase and now in 2022 Anno Domini hunger and malnutrition stare us in the face.