SWS: Hunger incidence slightly up in Q2 this year
Credit to Author: The Manila Times| Date: Mon, 22 Jul 2019 06:41:13 +0000
THE number of Filipino families who experienced hunger slightly increased in the second quarter of the year, according to the latest Social Weather Stations (SWS) released on Monday.
The poll from June 22 to 26 among 1,200 respondents nationwide showed 10 percent or an estimated 2.5 million families experienced “involuntary hunger” at least once in the past three months.
Hunger refers to involuntary suffering as the survey question specifies that the hunger experienced is due to lack of food to eat.
The latest figure is slightly higher than the 9.5 percent or an estimated 2.3 million families recorded in March 2019.
Of those who experienced involuntary hunger during 2019’s second quarter, 8.7 percent or 2.1 million families experienced “moderate hunger,” or experienced hunger once or a few times during the quarter.
The remaining 1.3 percent (around 320,000 families) experienced “severe hunger,” or experienced hunger either often or always.
The moderate-hunger figure of 8.7 percent is 0.6 points higher than the first quarter’s 8.1 percent, while severe hunger remained at 1.3 percent in June as in March.
“The rise in the nationwide Hunger rate comes after a decrease of 3.8 percentage points within the previous three quarters,” SWS said.
“From 13.3 percent (estimated 3.1 million families) in September 2018, it subsided to 10.5 percent (estimated 2.4 million families) in December, and then to 9.5 percent (estimated 2.3 million) in March 2019,” it added.
However, the increase happened only among the self-rated poor and self-rated food poor families, according to SWS.
Self-rated poverty measures the proportion of respondents rating their family as poor or “mahirap,” while self-rated food-poverty measures the proportion of respondents rating the food their family eats as poor or “mahirap.”
Among self-rated poor families, hunger rate went up from 11.9 percent in March (1.1 million families) to 16.2 percent (1.8 million families) in June.
But it went down among self-rated non-poor families from 7.9 percent (1.2 million families) in March to 4.9 percent (664,000) in June.
Among self-rated food poor families, it went up from 14.2 percent (959,000 families) to 17.3 percent (1.5 million families).
In contrast, it went down among self-rated non-food poor families from 7.7 percent (1.3 million families) to 6.1 percent (985,000 families). CATHERINE S. VALENTE