Philippines is now a case of humanitarian disaster

Open letter to President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo from the Citizens Committee on the National Crisis

Dear Madam President:

The Philippines is now a case of humanitarian disaster. Late last year, the Food and Nutrition Research Institution of the Department of Science and Technology (FNRI-DOST) released a survey finding that “8 out of 10 households are hungry.” This is the first time, to our knowledge, that the government, through an important agency, acknowledged the fact that mass hunger -- and not only mass poverty -- now grips the lands.

The reported FNRI-DOST finding that 8 out of 10 households are hungry, if true, can only mean that the Philippines has become a case of humanitarian disaster warranting the urgent concern of the international community and a program of international aid and assistance.

The human dimension of the FNRI-DOST statistic is reflected in this news report: “Mothers now selling their babies, while fathers sell their kidneys, and farmers eat field rats.”

The FNRI-DOST finding, Madam President, was made public through the November 2, 2003, issue of Today, which front-paged the story. But that story didn’t elicit any public reaction, even from the media. Today appears to be the only paper that published it.

The explanation for the public indifference, one supposes, is that the finding was just another piece of gloomy statistic, and the public has been numbed by gloomy statistics. But perhaps, if one recognized the human dimension behind that statistic, the conscience of a nation, heralded as the “only Christian nation in Asia,” might conceivably have been stirred, even if only a little, and even if only for a passing moment.

The statistic, Madam President, presented in human terms, explains why others are now selling their babies in Nueva Vizcaya, why farmers in rice-rich Nueva Ecija are scrounging for field rats to eat, and why infants in the nation’s public hospitals including the PHG -- are dying every day.
It might also explain why a devoted family man was impelled to leave home to work abroad, even in a terror-stricken land like Iraq. He had to eat and earn enough to enable the loved ones he left behind also to eat.

Angelo de la Cruz, Madam President, isn’t the symbol of the new Filipino heroism that your corny press relations people describe him to be. Angelo de la Cruz is the symbol of the humanitarian disaster that has engulfed this nation.

Hunger, Madam President, is the problem. Not the “fiscal-debt crisis” so ponderously written about by those U.P. economists. And to focus on the “fiscal-debt crisis,” particularly after the fact of mass hunger had been formally acknowledged by a government agency, is to say the least, weird and even funny if it weren’t so weird. For the so-called fiscal-debt crisis is merely symptomatic of a social cancer that is eating one’s intestine away, symptomatic, that is of the conditions that have brought the mass hunger about. And to focus on the “fiscal-debt crisis” at this time is to trivialize a natural disaster. It is even to trivialize the Office of the President.

It isn’t the “fiscal-debt crisis” that has brought about the hunger, Madam President. For this nation has been in the grip of mass hunger long before the FNRI-DOST released its finding officially confirming the fact and certainly long before the “fiscal-debt crisis” came about and about which the UP economists so scholarly write about.