Hunger in the SONA. The first of two instances in which Social Weather Stations data figured in last Monday’s State of the Nation Address was in President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s statement: “Dahil dumarami na naman daw ang pamilyang nagugutom, mamumuhunan tayo ng bago sa Hunger Mitigation Program na nakitang mabisa.” (“Because families in hunger are allegedly increasing again, we will invest anew in the Hunger Mitigation Program seen as effective.”)

For some time now, SWS has been pointing out that hunger has been rising at an alarming rate. The title of this piece, “Hunger has quadrupled since 2003,” is a comparison of its latest 20.3 percent national hunger rate (June 2009), as published last Monday, July 27, with the 5.1 percent national hunger rate as of September 2003, the record low for 45 SWS quarterly surveys on hunger from 1998 to the present.

Actually, this is the third time that the percentage of families going hungry at least once in the past three months, due to not having anything to eat (i.e., involuntarily hungry), has exceeded 20. Previously, it reached 21.5 in September 2007, and the record-high 23.7 in December 2008.

Prior to the great rise in hunger between 2003 and 2009, the SWS surveys show that there had been a great fall from 16.1 percent in March 2001 to the record-low of 5.1 in September 2003, i.e., hunger had been cut by two-thirds in the previous two and a half years. These important episodes of a decline followed by an increase deserve intense historical research, to discover what went right initially, and then what went wrong afterwards.

The timing of the publication of the new hunger report on the SONA day was coincidental. Since BusinessWorld (BW), which has the right of first publication, does not publish on weekends, it prefers to receive SWS reports on a Friday, so it can get reactions from government and private analysts for inclusion in a Monday story.

Before sending the report to BW, SWS had already given the information confidentially to Secretary of Health Francisco Duque. He is the Cabinet member responsible for evaluating the state of hunger. The SONA could not cite any official figures since the last time that the National Nutrition Council, which is under the Department of Health, did a nutrition survey was in 2003.

The responsibility for implementing the Hunger Mitigation Program, on the other hand, is spread among many agencies, among which the National Food Authority, under the Department of Agriculture, presumably has a major role.

The SWS national surveys are not specifically aimed at hunger mitigation program areas; the program may be effective there, but still too small to have a national impact. The Millennium Development Goal is for the Philippine hunger rate to be halved between 1990 and 2015. But since hunger was at 9 percent at the start of the SWS hunger surveys in 1998, and is now at 20 percent, the general trend is in the wrong direction.

Poverty in the SONA. The second use of SWS data in the SONA was when the President said: “Bumaba ang bilang ng nagsasabing mahihirap sila, mula 59 percent sa 47 percent.” (“The numbers of those saying they are poor fell from 59 percent to 47 percent.”) This is from the April 21, 2009 SWS report on Self-Rated Poverty (SRP), which saw a steady decline from June 2008 to February 2009. Has SRP continued to fall? Watch for the new June 2009 figure to be published next week; on the day it appears in print it will be uploaded, together with time series going back to 1985 (quarterly since 1992) in the SWS website.

The Millennium Development Goal is for Philippine poverty to be halved between 1990 and 2015. For the measure of Self-Rated Poverty, there were two surveys in 1990, giving 66 percent in April, and 70 percent in November, or an average of 68 percent. Halving it means reducing it by 34 points, or by 1.36 points per year over 25 years. At that rate, after 18 years or by 2008, the target Self-Rated Poverty rate is 43.5 percent. In fact, the four SWS quarterly poverty percentages in 2008 were 50, 59, 52 and 52, giving an average of 53.2, which is off-target by about 10 points.

However, the good news that the proportion rating themselves as poor is falling must be strongly qualified by the bad news that the people’s standards of poverty are also falling. Back in 2000, P10,000 per month was what most poor Metro Manilans called enough spending money for their households to escape poverty. Now, in 2009, most of them still say they would be content with P10,000, even though prices of consumer goods have risen by 55 percent in the past nine years. Dr. Ned Roberto’s consumer coping surveys tell him that more and more are only taking cola or soy sauce as their ulam (viand) with rice.

The obvious reason the SONA didn’t cite official figures on poverty is these show an embarrassing increase between 2003 and 2006, the last two years of the government surveys on income and expenditures. The next such official survey is scheduled to be done this year, and its findings won’t be known until late in 2010. Measuring poverty by the complicated and expensive means of income and expenditures surveys looks good in theory, but ends up producing scanty data in practice.

Measures of the state of the economy based on the people’s subjective ratings of their deprivation are not only theoretically valid, but also simple and inexpensive enough to repeat frequently, and thus provide constant guidance to policymakers and the general public over time. They are far more relevant to the state of the nation than Moody’s subjective ratings of the financial health of the government.

Contact SWS: www.sws.org.ph or mahar.mangahas@sws.org.ph.