Last year, we had the opportunity to visit my sister Denise and her family who live an unstrained rustic life in a vast farmland in Malasiqui, Pangasinan. We spent several days of perfect “nature relish”, which I deemed worth reprising. We got there in time for the chico harvest and the rush to fill up crates to meet the New Year celebration’s demand for globose fruits. So were the tomato vines - all limbs drooping heavy with fruits, as though restlessly waiting to be reaped. That made us rushing for baskets for a pleasantly novel gleaning experience.
Back in Cebu, we acquire edibles not from actual gleaning - the nearest farm we could get ourselves into is only the virtual FarmTown. Rather, we have to propel a push cart inside crowded grocery stores. And there’s Carbon Market, always replete with lively assortments to meet the plump urban demand for foodstuffs.
I especially enjoy Carbon Market at nightfall. The place comes even more alive with mingling dust, cacophony of creaky carts and hollering vendors, and crabbed sweaty porters – altogether amalgamating into what defines a bustling economic activity of the proletariat. Truckloads of fruits, vegetables, crops, including cutflowers from Busay, spilling into the dusty streets of M.C. Briones, Manalili, and Plaridel are at their cheapest rates, which make me marvel at the thought of relentless hunger and malnutrition still pervading in our society, like the tenacious culture of corruption in the bureaucracy.
It has been almost 30 years when member nations signed up at the UN World Food Conference in 1974 to pledge “that within a decade, no child will go to bed hungry, that no family will fear for its next day’s bread, and that no human being’s future and capacities will be stunted by malnutrition”. Yet the goal is still unattained. The eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, which comes first in the list of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) that 192 member nations have agreed to achieve by the year 2015 is likewise an unfulfilled aspiration.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimated 1.02 billion malnourished people in the world in 2009, an increase of more than 100 million since 1990. On the average, a person dies every second as a direct or indirect result of malnutrition - 4000 every hour - 100 000 each day - 36 million each year - 58 % of all deaths (2001-2004 estimates).
Of the 23 countries with 5 million or more undernourished people in 2001-2003, the Philippines ranked 8th, having 15.2 million people on the list. Other countries include India, China, Congo, Pakistan, and some African and Southeast Asian countries.
While there has been enough food that this planet can supply, with food production at its best yield, one word that encompasses all this perplexity is POVERTY, which leads to unequal food distribution.
Take this case of a hungry dog and a hungry child as an analogy to explain this appalling condition. Food will go to the dog if the owner has money and the child’s parents don’t. This illustrates that food flows in the direction of economic demand, and not nutritional need, especially where people have no money to purchase food.
I’m wondering if our leaders, who never get hungry, can ever bring themselves to sleep at this thought. Maybe they count sheeps to lull themselves. 15.2 million hungry heads would be too grim and too many to count.
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