Effects of Poverty in the Philippines
“Poverty is like a punishment for a crime you did not commit.” These are the very words of writer Eli Khamarov. As the Corona Virus disease (CoVid-19) continues to ravage many countries across the globe, the global economy is being greatly affected. According to a report by the United Nations, the number of people living in extreme poverty will reach 395 million.
In this kind of scenario, the Philippines’ response is to declare lockdown and implement stricter quarantine rules which, as we have observed, has not been very effective in containing and preventing the spread of CoVid-19. While the upper-class strata of the society cope with the changes as the world shifts to a new normal, those who belong to the lower strata are struggling to keep pace with the fast-moving world. With the continuous climbing of the number of people suffering because of seemingly endless poverty in our country, several problems will emerge as its effects.
Here are two primary effects of poverty in the Philippines:
Malnutrition
Food costs money. Someone who does not have something to pay for will probably have no single grain of rice on their table, resulting in malnutrition. According to Social Weather Station (SWS) survey, 30% of Filipino families reported having experienced hunger in September last year, and 9% of them said they were suffering from severe hunger. The gathered data represents the highest record of hunger in the country in the last two decades. Hunger and malnutrition have always been a problem for Filipinos. In fact, according to a World Bank report, the Philippines stood in fifth place among the East Asian countries and in the Pacific Region with the greatest number of stunted children. For over 30 years, there has been very minimal improvement in the ubiquity of malnutrition in the country, although the government allocates billions of pesos for the health security of the Filipinos.
Kara David, a renowned journalist, once made a documentary about the story of Udong, a 10-year-old boy from Aklan working as a farmer on a sugarcane farm. The young boy and his father would go to Batangas to harvest sugarcanes, far from their family. After six months of working in a distant place, Udong and his father would only bring home P1000 of earnings.
The story of Udong is just one of the thousands of stories of child labor in our country. According to the Philippine Statistics Office report, 4% of the 1.4 million domestic workers are underage. These children are supposed to be at school learning, but they are not; they are stretching their bones, hoping that their family will share a simple meal when they get home.
Crime
When things go bad, and people become desperate, the tendency is to practice drastic measures to survive. There was never a day that there was no news reported on television about the arrest of a person because of theft. Usually, the motive of stealing is to provide for the suspect’s economic needs. The linkage between poverty and crime was already proven when Nobel Laureate Gary Becker stated in 1968 in his Economic Theory of Criminal Behavior that “potential criminals are economically rational and respond significantly to the deterring incentives by the criminal justice system. They compare the gain from committing a crime with the expected cost, including the risk of punishment and the possibility of social stigma.” Becker’s statement implies that the people resorting to crime for their economic sustenance are aware of their actions. Their desire to supply their needs is just too strong compared to the suffering they might endure once caught.
It is essential to recognize that the reason why many people live in poverty is not their actions. Slum-dwellers, ‘the no job, no pay’ laborers, farmers, fisherfolks, child laborers, and the homeless, among many others, remain poor primarily because their circumstances result from long years of exploitation. It is wrong and foolish of us to make ourselves believe that poverty results from an individual’s choices rather than how the society has been shaped, or worse, designed to stay the same.
We must realize that people are left behind as we step toward our dream of keeping up with first-world countries. We cannot just stand on the corner and watch as the number of poverty-related crimes continues to rise, while the number of people dying from poverty increases, and while those in authority steal the people’s money to buy weapons instead of allocating it for their constituents’ health security and education.
References:
Calleja, J.P. (2020). Pandemic Fuels Child Labor Increase in the Philippines. Retrieved from https://www.ucanews.com/news/pandemic-fuels-child-labor-increase-in-the-philippines/90603#
David, K. (2017). Uuwi na si Udong. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_fa-5Zz5po&t=1370s
Garoupa N. (2014). Economic theory of criminal behavior. In: Bruinsma G., Weisburd D. (eds) encyclopedia of criminology and criminal justice. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5690-2_409
World Bank. (2021). Undernutrition in the Philippines: Scale, scope, and opportunities for nutrition policy and programming. Retrieved from https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/philippines/publication/-key-findings-undernutrition-in-the-philippines