Food poor

Three things must be considered on the September Social Weather Station (SWS) survey which showed that half of the 10.8 million households interviewed considered themselves poor, a figure unchanged from the June survey.

The survey showed that 37 percent of these households considered themselves food-poor or three percentage points down from the 40 percent registered in the June survey.

The SWS survey showed that these same households in Luzon and the Visayas considered a P8,000 to P5,000 budget as sufficient to cover their monthly food consumption “so they won’t feel food-poor.”

That same survey also showed that the budgets pegged by these households as sufficient in order to consider themselves as “not poor” went up to P15,000 in Manila, P10,000 in Luzon and the Visayas and P9,500 in Mindanao.

It’s easy to put up numbers when making budgets because that’s essentially making a wish list unlike those made to Santa Claus before Christmas time in childhood.

Unfortunately, instead of Santa Claus we have the government and the companies who aren’t quite charitable nor benevolent as they would like to make us believe.

While we have wage boards to negotiate with companies, Congress and the local officials are not as accessible until it’s election season or until a calamity hits whichever comes first.

All these numbers eventually will not matter for communities that are hardest hit by calamities like the 7.2-magnitude earthquake in Bohol. Affected families lined up at the Pag-Ibig to secure housing loans to rebuild their homes.

Hence a lot of Filipinos take two or more jobs to supplement their income, not unlike an increasing number of Americans who start working in their teen years to support themselves.

Or they go abroad to earn even bigger at the expense of sacrificing their families. The survey, like all previous surveys, merely highlights the ever growing gap between the poor, the middle class and the privileged.

To its credit, the Aquino administration had been doing its best to close that gap through tourism and even band aid programs like the “Pantawid” or doleouts. The poverty problem isn’t something that is solved overnight or even during the lifetime of two administrations as his predecessors amply showed.

Gainful employment and providing incentives to both employees and companies alike are just some of the needed programs to kickstart the economy and, unlike Aquino’s predecessor, a general house-cleaning is in order to restore public trust and optimism for a brighter and a more secure future.