More Filipinos are hungry

PASSION FOR REASON
On SWS survey: Hungry, but why not angry?

By Raul Pangalangan
Inquirer
Last updated 00:07am (Mla time) 11/03/2006

Published on Page A12 of the November 3, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

THE latest survey by the poll group Social Weather Stations (SWS) shows that a record high 16.9 percent of families experienced hunger at least once in the past three months, equivalent to some 2.9 million households in the country. These families consisted of those who suffered “severe hunger” (those who replied that they went hungry “often” or “always” in the past three months) and “moderate hunger” (they experienced hunger “only once” or “a few times” in that period).

The SWS findings mean that roughly one out of every six people we see in the streets must have felt poverty-caused hunger pangs. This actually got me wondering. Almost three million households and assuming they have at least five family members each — that is a lot of hungry people. Why then don’t we see angry mobs rampaging in the streets?

Because hunger by itself does not lead to revolution, and suffering must be sparked by a sense of injustice to produce social discontent. But if that’s the case, isn’t the skewed distribution of wealth palpable enough to agitate the hungry? In a land where people pay to use gyms because they ingest much more calories than they expend, and glossy magazines speak in loving detail of the latest diet fads, while millions subsist on instant noodles? In a Third World economy that hosts a Jaguar dealership while “diaryo/bote” [old newspapers and empty bottles] collectors roll along on makeshift wooden “caritons” [carts]?

Indeed, globalization has made the rich-poor gap even more painfully dramatic, as Manila’s elite wallow in imported gadgets, gourmet food and vanity products, playthings priced for high-end Western consumers. How do the poor explain it to their children? In an earlier time, wouldn’t that have sufficed to trigger off unrest? What is it in 21st-century Philippines that staves off the necessary upheaval?

First is the social safety valve of migrant labor and its downstream “balato” [token benefit] for the rest of the economy. For as long as there is an attainable solution, within reach and promising an immediate windfall, there is hope, and the urge to rebel mellows into an urge to earn well. Indeed, as in the old trusted capitalist guidebooks, it keeps the poor too busy earning a wage for them to theorize about how to escape the “grayness of their condition.” That was what made Leninism path-breaking, that the worker became revolutionary just by being a good proletarian.

Second is the loss of faith in mass movements and structural changes. The big upheavals at Edsa People Power I and II have not lived up to their promise, and have fostered, at the core, a disillusion about politics “writ large,” to borrow Plato’s metaphor. Even the most impassioned reformers have turned inward, away from protest rallies and toward quieter transformative work at ground level, e.g., Gawad Kalinga or SERVE Inc., a community-based NGO doing forest management within the Marikina watershed, that can help people in the here and now. Why after all postpone helping others, the way millenarian movements admonish, when you can lend a hand today? Worse, hunger is so urgent a problem that rallies appear to be a solution only because they give added income for the rent-a-crowd.

It has been said: “Every revolutionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction … summed up by the phrases: (1) It’s completely impossible. (2) It’s possible, but it’s not worth doing. (3) I said it was a good idea all along.” I think we are at Stage 2 right now, a long way from Stage 3 when today’s heretics can say, “We told you so.”

And finally, there is what the philosopher Unger calls a “theoretical exhaustion,” a failed search for that compelling vision of a recreated world. “Third World countries continue to be the playing ground of predatory oligarchies that often can scarcely be distinguished from self-appointed revolutionary vanguards. [They have fostered] a conviction that nothing important can be changed by deliberate collective action. All revolutionary programs are made to seem utopian reveries, bound to end in despotism and disillusionment.”

Just consider the problem of large family sizes and poverty. If indeed there has been an inward-turning and people have begun to seek doable solutions in their day-to-day lives, then certainly family planning should be up there among concrete measures with demonstrable, non-debatable benefits. Even if you freeze the family income, then spread it among two children instead of eight, ensure that they attend school and graduate, and free up the mother sooner to work and earn outside—what more convincing should it take?

Yet this is where competing visions come in. Superstition and religion have thus far trumped those rational approaches, and unless we educate our publics and touch the communal conscience, hungry but not angry is what we’ll end up.

As a professor of University of the Philippines, I have spoken before various groups and I am convinced that the high concerns of academia are not the concerns of the ordinary folk. How can I connect with these constituencies in ways that make sense to them?

In 1975, at the height of martial law, I was one of those college students who distributed copies of a booklet entitled “A Message of Hope to Filipinos Who Care.” It was written and published by former senator Jovito R. Salonga, and we stored our stash of the forbidden booklet somewhere in the university’s Vinzon’s Hall, distributing them to all who even dared receive and hold on to a copy. There were times I wondered if indeed Salonga could really find any “Filipinos Who Cared,” but history has proved him right several times over.

The Brazilian educator Paolo Friere said: “Just as the oppressor, in order to oppress, needs a theory of oppressive action, so the oppressed, in order to become free, also needs a theory of action.”

Kitamokitako,
Marahil ay hindi na magawang magalit ng 15.6M hungry Pinoys dahil nga ang ginagawa ay namamalimos at namumulot/nag-aabang ng pagkain sa basurahan. Hindi naman sila makakatanim ng Kamote dahil wala silang lupa.
Hintayin natin, malapit na ang eleksyon. Aali-aligid na ang mga politiko sa kanila dala ang pangako at “regalo” na walang kaakibat na kindness.

You’re welcome, Ellen.
Yeah, I fully agree that this Cha-Cha is just to muddle the real issue of cheating, which for me is unforgivable. I couldn’t imagine what Pinoys life would be till 2010 and beyond given these current poverty data. Kung hindi magagalit ngayon, kailan pa?