On poverty and the 4-Ps

The three-day summit on poverty, inequality and social reform held at the Bureau of Soils in Quezon City lamented the slowness with which poverty is being addressed in the country. I agree, it is time we do something more about our poverty. The question is how? Before we answer this question let us look at how serious the country’s poverty is.

In his presentation last Feb. 8, giving the latest statistics, Secretary General Romulo Virola of the National Statistics Coordination Board (NSCB) reported that a Filipino needed P974 in 2009 to meet his/her monthly food needs and P1,403 to stay out of poverty. This means that a family of five, the average for the country, needed a monthly income of P4,869 to meet food needs and P7,017 to stay out of poverty. On a daily basis, a family of five needed P231 daily income to stay out of poverty based on 30.4 days average per month. These figures were for the whole nation in 2009.

For a family of five in Metro Manila that year, the amount needed to move out of poverty was P8,251 per month or about P271 daily. For those living outside Metro Manila, the figures were lower.

However, to many people, these figures are fantastically low. In Manila, is a family of five really not poor anymore with an income of P8,251 or even P10,000? Even in Cebu, these figures are too low. After food, a family also needs more money for shelter, clothing, education, medical services, water, light, transportation and communication to function well in our fast-changing economy.

In Congress, many questions were asked recently about the real cost of living and how it is computed by NSCB. The questions became more pointed when congressmen learned that the NSCB is using a new method of computing the cost of food for the poor, which resulted in a much lower food threshold and therefore lower poverty incidence than the measure used in the past.

For example, based on the old method, in 2009, a Filipino family of five would need a monthly income of P7,953, not P7,017 using the new method, to be counted out of poverty. Based on the new method, the country’s poverty incidence would register 20.9 percent of all families or 26.5 percent when computed on the basis of the total population of the country.

Under the old method, poverty incidence in 2009 was much higher at 26.3 percent of the total number of families or 32.6 percent of the total number of population of the country. Poverty incidence when counted based on population is higher by the way, because poor families are on the average bigger in size than well-off families.

Compared to our close neighbors in Asia, how good or bad is our poverty situation? According to Virola, among Asean countries, the Philippines is better off than Laos PDR (33.5 percent), Myanmar (32.0 percent), and Cambodia (30.1 percent) but falls behind Vietnam (14.5 percent) and Indonesia (14.2 percent).

There you are but note that Virola was using Philippine poverty incidence figures computed on the basis of the new method (26.5 percent). Based on the old method (32.7 percent) we were not really different from Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia.

Like any other problem, the question of how to solve poverty is not easy to answer. But like any other problem, the only way to really solve poverty is to look for its cause and see how this can be overcome. No amount of so-called poverty alleviation programs will solve the problem. Like any Band-Aid program, they only addressed the symptoms, not the cause.

You know the axiom that if you give a hungry man a fish, he is happy for a day but no more. The right thing to do is to teach the man how to fish because by then, he will be hungry no more. But this, too, is wrong because if the man is really hungry, teaching him how to fish would not work because his mind is far away looking for an immediate way to put something in his stomach. He must be fed, too, at the same time he is being taught how to fish. This brings to mind P-Noy’s expansion of the 4-P or Conditional Cash Program initiated toward the end of Arroyo’s administration. P-Noy allotted more than P20 billion for this program this year. Is this the right answer to poverty? In part, yes, because poverty is really a multifaceted animal. We need more than just one tool to kill it.

The summit statement said that the 4-Ps, the program designed to provide care for indigent mothers and keep malnourished children in public schools, was a “positive initiative to prevent the poorest from falling in society. It also said, however, that the P1,400 given per family monthly under the program was way below the official P7,000 poverty threshold for a family of five and that of the bottom 30 percent of the population, only 2 million families or less than half benefited from the program.

I say there’s nothing wrong with the 4-Ps taken as part of an overall program to combat poverty in the country. Its beauty is that it has both short-term and long-term objectives. The short-term objective is to alleviate the condition of the poor by giving them cash, no matter how small, to supplement their small income from other sources to buy food and meet other basic needs. The second objective is met through education and improved health of the children who will be better prepared later on with the wherewithal to find work either on their own small enterprise or in working for others, and thus have more chances of rising from poverty than their poorly educated and hungry parents.