MANILA, Philippines – The number of Filipino families who experienced hunger slightly went up in the second quarter of the year, a survey conducted by the Social Weather Stations (SWS) revealed Monday (July 22).
In the nationwide survey conducted from June 22 to 26, the SWS found that 10 percent or an estimated 2.5 million families experienced involuntary hunger at least once in the past three months.
The pollster said this figure is slightly higher than the 9.5 percent or an estimated 2.3 million Filipinos recorded in March 2019.
The measure of Hunger refers to involuntary suffering since the survey question specifies that the hunger experienced was due to lack of food to eat.
The SWS said the 10 percent nationwide quarterly hunger rate in June is the sum of 8.7 percent or an estimated 2.1 million families who experienced moderate hunger, and 1.3 percent or an estimated 320,000 families who experienced severe hunger.
Moderate hunger refers to those who experienced hunger “only once“ or “a few times” in the last three months, while severe hunger refers to those who experienced it “often” or “always” in the last three months.
The SWS noted that the rise in the nationwide Hunger rate comes after a decrease of 3.8 percentage points within the previous three quarters.
From 13.3 percent or an estimated 3.1 million families in September 2018, it subsided to 10.5 percent in December, and then to 9.5 percent in March 2019.
The pollster, however, said the increase happened only among the self-rated poor and self-rated food poor families.
Self-Rated Poverty measures the proportion of respondents rating their family as poor, while Self-Rated Food Poverty refers to respondents rating the food their family eats as poor.
Among self-rated poor families, the Hunger rate went up by 4.3 points, from 11.9 percent in March (estimated 1.1 million families) in March, to 16.2 percent (estimated 1.8 million families) in June.
In contrast, it went down by 3 points among self-rated non-poor families, from 7.9% in March, to 4.9% in June.
While among self-rated food poor families, it went up from 14.2 percent (estimated 959,000 million families) in March, to 17.3 percent (estimated 1.5 million families) in June.
It went down by 1.6 points among self-rated non-food poor families from 7.7 percent in March, to 6.1 percent in June.
The SWS said that by area, the nationwide quarterly Hunger incidence of 10% consists of 15.7 percent in Metro Manila, 9.3 percent in Balance Luzon, 8.7 percent in the Visayas, and 9.0 percent in Mindanao.
The SWS June 2019 survey, conducted with 1,200 respondents, has sampling error margins of ±3% for national percentages, and ±6% each for Metro Manila, Balance Luzon, the Visayas, and Mindanao.
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