Palace aiming for ‘long-term solutions’ to poverty

Malacañang gave an assurance that the government was putting measures in place to tame inflation following results of a Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey showing more Filipinos now rating themselves as poor.

Presidential spokesperson Harry Roque took note of the SWS survey conducted from June 27 to 30, in which the number of Filipinos considering themselves as poor rose to 48 percent.

“We take seriously the SWS June 2018 survey, which shows an increase in the incidence of families who consider themselves as poor, as well as families rating themselves as food-poor,” he said.

He said that the government was implementing measures to bring down inflation and improve the plight of Filipinos.

“We are putting in place long-term solutions to significantly reduce inflation and help poor Filipino families,” Roque said in a statement.

Measures

These measures included allowing the importation of rice and generating jobs through the “Build, Build, Build” program, which was aimed also at lowering the cost of transporting food and other goods.

The Department of Finance was pushing for passage of a law that would replace quantitative restrictions with tariffs on rice imports.

Letting imported rice come in could bring down prices and reduce inflation rate.

Roque issued the statement mainly in reaction to the SWS survey results.

They showed that from 9.8 million families in March, 11.1 million families now rate themselves as poor.

The same survey showed that more Filipinos considered themselves food-poor, or people who believed that they were eating poor men’s meals.

The number of families who considered themselves food-poor rose from 29 percent, or 6 million families, in March to 34 percent, or 7.8 million families, in June.

The worsening self-rated poverty came in the wake of an inflation rate of 5.2 percent last month, which broke a five-year record.