Poverty Issues in the Philippines

The World Bank released a study which shows that approximately an additional 44 million people from developing countries such as the Philippines may be driven into poverty due to the continuing rise in basic commodities such as wheat, sugar and oil. Just this week, oil prices have already reached a two-year high as mass demonstrations continue to take place in the oil-rich Middle East region particularly in Bahrain and Libya.

According to the report, if the prices continue to rise, many more people will be more vulnerable to malnutrition and then other forms of diseases since they will be forced to consume low cost but less nutritious food. In fact, we can already see this in our country where there is now a high incidence of kidney diseases especially among the poor due to the fact that many of them now rely on instant noodles for their main staple.

These instant noodles are very high in sodium content. That is why more and more Filipinos are now lining up for dialysis treatment. Sadly, a family earning less than P200 a day would not be able to afford a regular dialysis treatment which would often cost at least P1,500 per visit. This is why many poor Filipinos often die without even having the opportunity to be treated properly at a health facility.

Other victims of poverty are our children, some of whom are exposed to many evil vices of society as they are forced to work early at a very young age. I read in a column in another daily that there are now girls as young as 12 years old who sell their bodies for sex to truck drivers in Manila just for P300. According to the columnist, these girls usually have 3 to 4 customers per night and they often perform sexual intercourse at the back of a dirty dump truck.

If the cost of basic commodities continues to rise, we can also expect criminality to rise given that many people will now resort to desperate means just to be able to put food on the table for their families. We can clearly see this in the recent cases of Filipino “drug mules” who work for drug syndicates to bring in illegal drugs into countries like China, Thailand and Indonesia. As former President Joseph “Erap” Estrada always says, a hungry stomach knows no law.

We are an agricultural country. One of the things that our government ought to do is to ensure that proper land reform is implemented. If you drive through the countryside, you will easily see so many idle agricultural lands, which if used properly can easily help ensure our self-sufficiency especially in rice, corn and sugar. By being self-sufficient, we would no longer have to be at the mercy of the rising world prices of these basic goods.

Yet awarding land titles to our farmers is not enough. Our government agencies such as the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Agrarian Reform would also need to help by providing our farmers easy access to capital so that they no