Read on Twitter
The words used to skirt around the brutality of poverty are telling. “Involuntary hunger,” the term that independent pollster Social Weather Stations (SWS) prefers to describe “hunger due to lack of food to eat,” blunts the rough edges of the poor’s lived reality.
#COVID19PH
#COVID19PH
Some 7.6 million of such households have gone hungry at least once amid COVID-19, according to an SWS survey in September. To illustrate, this is equivalent to more than twice the total number of families in Metro Manila and just a little shy of Australia’s, an entire country’s.
This bumps up the hunger incidence to 30.7%, the highest such rate since March 2012. By 2020 standards, this might seem par for the course. https://www.rappler.com/nation/hunger-philippines-sws-survey-september-2020
Except it should not be, if indeed the government, as the president and his economic managers say, has done a good job at handing out emergency aid to those most in need.
From April to May, households could expect from the first tranche a Social Amelioration Program (SAP) grant worth a little over 75% of what they would earn in at least a month (see the first tweet in this thread for the sidebar).
But if the SAP distribution for 18 million households, about 75% of the country’s 24.4 million estimated total, has been targeted well, not only poor and low-income households would benefit from it but also a modest portion of the lower middle-income class.
The Family Income and Expenditure Survey (FIES) in 2018 estimates around 830,000 Filipino households to be food-poor, with per capita income less than the subsistence threshold. But just because you are not food-poor does not mean you are no longer vulnerable to economic shocks.
There is more to poverty than can be captured by official welfare indicators. Researchers from Philippine Institute for Development Studies have proposed an income group typology that goes beyond profiling poverty and instead factors in inequalities even among the non-poor.
Using the 2018 FIES microdata, they defined “poor” as those with less than a monthly income of P10,957 for a family of five; the “low-income,” as those with between P10,957 and P21,914; the lower middle-income as those with between P21,914 and P43,828. http://bit.ly/3jG12hD
