Now back to Pablo
THE May 2013 Global Food Security Update of the UN World Food Progamme marked “parts of Mindanao in the Philippines” as among the areas in the world classified as under phase 4 emergency food security situations. Why is that? Two reasons: 1) continued poverty in the country’s poorest of the poor provinces, and, typhoon Pablo.
True, the local governments have been distributing relief assistance. Except that, local governments are not designed to sustain the livelihood of thousands of families for months on end. Sooner than not, other services and projects will suffer if the affected families are not returned to their selfsustaining states.
Phase 4 is the classification for areas that manifest increasing household food insecurity. In detail: Phases 1A and 1B means generally food secure, phase 2 is moderately/borderline food insecure, phase 3 is acute food and livelihood crisis, phase 4 is humanitarian emergency, and phase 5 is famine/ humanitarian catastrophe.
No matter how long and loud local government executives and national government agencies will deny that there are still people starving because of typhoon Pablo, there actually are. Except that these people are making do and finding allies not in these government officials but among those who have had no qualms about exposing sufferings and poverty – the militants. But this shouldn’t be so as government should always be there to address these situations. For one, it has committed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), and food insecurity is a basic component of extreme poverty.
Under MDG to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, the Philippines has committed to “halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than one dollar a day, and halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.
There is this drawback.
“The IPC (Integrated Food Security Phase Classification) round conducted in the Philippines in January 2013 determined that 2 provinces were under IPC acute phase 4 ‘emergency’ food security conditions, 9 in phase 3 ‘crisis’, 12 in phase 2 ‘stressed’. The provinces with high levels of acute food insecurity are mainly located in Region IX (Zamboanga Peninsula), in Armm (Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao) as well as in the natural disaster prone belt along the east of Mindanao and in Lanao del Norte. In these areas, livelihoods have been seriously eroded due to Typhoon Bopha, as coconut and banana groves were damaged and commercial and agricultural companies have closed or stopped operations. The contribution of various forms of wage and salary income to households’ livelihoods has tumbled, declining by more than half in the worst affected areas,” the update read.
This is but to remind technocrats and bureaucrats alike that food security is not just about having relief goods in stock to distribute to families deprived of livelihood, it is about families being able to provide for themselves. In such case, indeed, there are areas that are suffering from food insecurity, and this is a task that should be focused on to ensure that families are enable to thrive and improve their lot, and not become demanding beneficiaries of imported relief goods. This is but a guide to use ordinary citizens by which we should measure how effective our government is in addressing poverty.