7 in 10 Filipinos can’t afford nutritious food–sofi 2022

The cost of a healthy diet in the Philippines has been constantly increasing since 2017 when it was estimated at $3.843 per person per day. In 2018, it was $3.998 per person per day and reached $4.054 per person per day in 2019.

Based on the latest SOFI 2022 data, a Filipino should spend nearly $1,500 (about P84,000 at current exchange rate) annually to stay on a healthy diet.

“There is a recent WFP study showing that with the current minimum wages across different regions, hardly any of those workers in various regions of the country can afford to buy nutritious food for their family,” economist Fermin D. Adriano, a former Agriculture Undersecretary, told the Businessmirror.

“It also noted that you almost have to double the take home pay of workers to afford decent nutritious food for the family,” Adriano added.

More expensive food

ADRIANO said the country’s accelerating inflation and continuous depreciation of peso would make nutritious food “more unaffordable” to Filipino consumers. Adriano pointed out that almost 60 percent of the income of poor Filipino households goes to the purchase of food.

“If food prices increase as a result of the depreciation of the peso (for those imported ones, like most canned goods—meat and fish) and supply shortages, these will mean that the greater income of the poor will go to purchasing food, leaving little for other needs (health, education, clothing, etc.),” he said.

Recommendations

ACCORDING to Adriano, if the government wants to make the country food-sufficient, then it must do three things: craft a medium-term plan outlining how food sufficiency will be achieved; allocate the necessary budget to realize the plan; and manage better the country’s growth population.

Adriano noted that the country’s population growth in the past easily outstripped domestic agricultural productivity growth.

“We need to develop commodities where we have a comparative advantage so that we can export and generate more jobs and foreign exchange revenues. The fastest way of promoting growth and development is investing in areas where the country has a comparative advantage. This is always lost in the mind of our populist policymakers,” he said.

Adriano also noted that the Filipino public needs to understand “better” the balance between food importation and local production to meet the country’s total food requirements.

“We have a decent level of sufficiency for rice (around 90 percent),” but importation cannot be helped, he said, “if we are to plug the remaining 10 percent supply gap. This goes for other commodities wherein we can estimate our sufficiency level and decide when to import to plug the supply gap.”

Undernourishment, food insecurity

THE 2022 SOFI report also showed that the number of undernourished Filipinos declined to 5.7 million in the years of 2019 to 2021 compared to 12.4 million in the years 2004 to 2006.

The report bared that about 53.3 million Filipinos were either moderately or severely food-insecure as of 2021.

The 2022 SOFI report showed that 4.8 percent of the country’s population or about 5.3 million were severely food insecure while 48 million were moderately or severely food insecure.

“This is scandalous. The number of food insecure in the country (50 million) is more than the population of Australia (26 million), Canada (35 million), Malaysia (30 million), and most of the countries in the world,” Adriano said.

“If this happened in developed countries, it will be enough to replace the sitting government. But we are not a developed country and hence, our policymakers can get away with a crime,” he added.

The 2022 SOFI report explained that people who experienced severe food insecurity are those that have “likely run out of food, experienced hunger and at the most extreme, gone for days without eating, putting their health and well-being at grave risk.”

Meanwhile, moderate food insecurity refers to “a lack of consistent access to food, which diminishes dietary quality, disrupts normal eating patterns, and can have negative consequences for nutrition, health and well-being” of the consumers, according to the report.