LOCAL FOOD SECURITY

Don’t get me wrong, I really mean “national food security”, but I just used the term “local” to bring attention to the high incidence of hunger that now occurs in many local communities nationwide. As far as I know, our government does not have systematic means of measuring hunger right now, and I doubt if they are even monitoring it. On the more serious side, our government does not also have a systematic method of measuring or recognizing the existence of famine, a phenomenon that happens when hunger escalates beyond manageable limits.

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It may just be a matter of semantics, but there is really a huge difference between hunger and famine. One is really greater than the other, in much the same way that there ought to be an official difference between an outbreak and an epidemic. When does hunger turn to famine, and when does an outbreak become an epidemic? Fortunately in the case of storms, we have a way of telling when it becomes a typhoon. Numerically speaking, how many people have to die from hunger before we officially recognize that a famine already exists?

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At the risk of sounding like an alarmist, there is a valid reason to talk about this subject, as reports of “extreme hunger” are now coming out, as opposed to just “plain hunger”. I know that this is not supposed to happen in a country with abundant agricultural resources, but it is indeed happening now, as many of our people are now unable to eat three square meals for days in a row. Is this a problem that we should just ignore now, or should be not do something about it already? Should we just wait until people actually drop dead in the streets?

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As I see it, there is an urgent need to attend to this problem now, and the right thing to do I think is to declare this as a responsibility of the local government units (LGUs). This is not to say that the national government agencies (NGAs) should not do anything about it, because they should still be tasked with policy making and resource management as far as this challenge is concerned. This approach is consistent with the principle of decentralization, but what is more important here is the fact that in the case of hunger, the local officials would be in a better position to deal with it.

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Without any doubt, I say that most of our local officials are clueless now about the real picture of poverty in their own jurisdictions. While the face of poverty is nothing new to them anymore to the extent that they have probably taken it for granted, hunger is a totally different issue, because not all poor people are suffering from it, at least relatively speaking. The relativity here pertains to the fact that many of the poor people are still able to eat one way or the other, setting aside the issue of whether they are able to meet their recommended dietary intakes (RDIs) or not.

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I am sorry to say that even the RDI concept seems to be alien to both our LGU and NGA officials. Either that or they are simply ignoring it, thinking perhaps that they could not do anything about it anyway. Notwithstanding this apparent conceptual vacuum, there is still a need to formalize right away our national standards for defining what constitutes famine and what should constitute our sustainable RDI levels, these two concepts being very closely inter-related.

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What must our local officials do in order to deal with the problem of hunger in their own jurisdictions? The first order of business I think is to check the data that is already available at the national level, and based on that, they should track down the real people who are actually going hungry, in other words they should already give a “human face” to the impersonal data that is already available. What should they do after that? While I am not in favor of giving away dole outs as a long term strategy, I think that as a temporary measure, just to contain the problem right away, they should immediately start feeding programs or issue out food coupons as the case may be.

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In order to avoid the perpetuation of a dole out mentality, the beneficiaries of the feeding or coupon programs should right away be moved over to a livelihood program where they could already start earning regular incomes. This is easier said than done, but rather than do this entirely by themselves, the LGUs should tap the support of local non-government organizations (NGOs) that are geared towards this type of advocacy. In response to this need, I am organizing an NGO that could assist in the marketing of products coming from all livelihood projects. I am not new in this undertaking, since I am just reviving something that I have already done before.