Burnt rice, anyone?

Walang  tutong  sa  taong nagugtom, a  Filipino proverb says. “There’s no burnt rice to a hungry person.”

Hunger anchors World Food Day (WFD)  marked  Oct. 16. The Philippines and  Food and Agriculture Organization member-countries established  WFD in 1979.  Today, 150 countries observe WFD.

WFD came after  Henry Kissinger  told  the  1974  World Food Conference: “Within 10 years, no child would go to bed hungry.”  Today, one out of every eight—12 percent of the world’s population—are food short.

Political static drowns  WFD’s message here. The European Union, United Nations to Organization of the Islamic Conference  welcomed  the agreement by the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front “to turn swords into ploughshares.” But  aging Moro National Liberation Front and communist commissars  threaten mayhem. So do rebels like Umbra Kato and gang.

Sen.  Ralph Recto  gutted  a P60-billion “sin tax” proposal to a pittance of P15 billion. He  now  twists in a  whirlwind of criticism.  Did  coddled  tobacco  firms, in a hush-hush  meeting, provide Recto’s mask of injured innocence?

Social Weather Station’s October report  says 4.3 million  households  were hard put to get even burnt  rice. Over  the past three months, 21 percent  “experienced  involuntary hunger, at least once.”

“Moderate hunger”—“having nothing to eat only once or a few times—surged. In  crammed  in Metro Manila, overall  hunger  rose 10 percent.  It  inched  up in  Mindanao.  Decades of conflict  castrated  its   potential  as the  nation’s breadbasket.

Weather pattern distortions,  continued post harvest losses  and growing populations  interlocked with shrinking farm lands. These  morphed into the “new geopolitics of food scarcity,” Earth Policy Institute’s  Lester Brown notes.

Between 2007 and 2008, grain prices doubled. FAO reported prices bolted by a  further   1.4 percent  in September. “That left more people hungry than any time in history… An era of  filled granaries had come to  an end.”

The  rich  rearranged   their menus.  But the poor spend  50 to 70 percent of  skimpy  incomes on food. They’ve   long  consumed the last scrap of   tutong. They skip meals.

In India, 24 percent of families  now  go through foodless days, a  “Save the Children” survey found. More than half the people of Haiti are  undernourished.  The  Global Hunger Index of 2012  identifies 20 countries saddled by  “alarming” levels of hunger, These  include East Timor, Bangladesh, Eritrea and Burundi to Madagascar, Niger, Dijibouti  and Nepal.

World  food  reserves dwindled from 107 days of consumption to only  74 days in 2008. This triggered  a “land rush.” Some Gulf states, China,  South  Korea, Libya, even  Sweden,   bought or  leased land  where they can grow food for themselves.

Over 30 million hectares have now been contracted. International Food Policy Research  Institute  estimates nearly $20 to $30 billion a year is  spent by better-off  countries on land. Most  are in Africa.

Saudi Arabia, whose aquifers ran dry last year, bought half  a million hectares in Tanzania. South Korea signed a 99-year lease for 1.3 million  hectares of agricultural land in Madagascar.

Other major destinations for land hunters are Ethiopia and the two Sudans. Millions in these countries are sustained with UN World Food Programme donations.

Here, 21 out of every 100 infants have low weight at birth. Wasting and stunting (32 percent) result when kids are nursed by wizened, chronically malnourished mothers. Out of every 1,000 births here, 29 never make it to age 5.

Today, the country is almost on par with the Dominican Republic in infant mortality rates. It  lags  behind Malaysia’s 6. In an overall ranking of 193 countries, we’re  wedged  at  slot  80.

Worse, these  dry-as-sawdust statistics  infect  many of us with Mego syndrome (My  eyes glaze over). We’re blind to the pain. We do not see Lazarus at the gate.

President Benigno Aquino III’s Conditional Cash Transfer program eased some of  hunger’s raw pain.  CCT  provides families  monthly   grants of P1,400—provided they  keep children in school, have them vaccinated and enroll in health programs. There are  3.08 million  household-beneficiaries.

The World Bank, Australian Agency for International Development and  Asian Development Bank are  providing additional support until 2015. That’s  when  this  program phases out.

Will  we  see then  the frail men and women who till slivers of land or  fish  depleted  waters for what  they are? Only they  can provide a  permanent solution to hunger.

Ironically, they’re  locked  into subsistence treadmills by  elite political  dynasties. They’re denied access to tools for production, but above all, a just share from their work. As  a result,   their lives  are truncated  by disease, lack of schooling and limited hope. It is obscene  that those who produce food  are often the ones who go hungry.

“Critics say our  crafting  of policies often confused the problem of hunger with that of it’s cause: social injustice,” the late National Scientist Dioscoro Umali wrote. “They insist  our flawed  strategies  did not  stem  from  poor judgement.  At rock bottom, it  was a simple case of old-fashioned greed. Avarice  rationalized  betrayal of the weak.”

“I pray  this assessment is wrong,” the Dean added. “(Otherwise)  we will   have much to answer for  from   those whose lives  and hopes  were blighted by hunger.”