GIVEN the promise of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to cut the country’s poverty level to 9% by the time he technically leaves office in 2028, it is not strange for the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) and the National Economic Development Authority (NEDA) to produce figures that hew closely to what the Palace desires.
PSA and NEDA actually control the figures and determine the basket of goods and expenses for services that each Filipino must consume daily to replicate himself or herself. In short, it is the survival price for Juan and Juana, and Pepe and Pilar, even if the figures are closer to the prices when the forex rate was P4 to $1.
One way to reduce the poverty level is to devise the fiction that the cost of living is different in each region, province, town and city. Thus, a Filipino may live for P79 a day somewhere in Minalungao, Nueva Ecija, or in Maconacon, Isabela since there’s plenty of wildlife to consume, water is free, and no electricity bills. They refuse to realize that commodity prices are higher in the rural areas, power rates are also higher than those in Metro Manila, local water districts (67 of which are controlled by the Villar political dynasty) also charge higher tariffs. Transport fares are, of course, higher as fuel have to be transported to places distant from Batangas, Bataan and Manila where the fuel depots are located.
Window dressing has been a bad habit among economists, and Filipinos are not exempt, from the time Jaime C. Laya padded the Central Bank reserves by $600 million to show the country’s tottering economy was in great shape. That led to a technical default. Are the NEDA and PSA exempt from the Laya syndrome? Of course not, except that they have their respective bureaucracies to provide the matrices, flow charts, regression analyses and conceptual and theoretical frameworks to prove that their stochastic terrorism on figures would tweak reality.
So, what are the statistics that provide the Palace with post-Christmas glee? There are less poor Filipinos in the first half of 2023 compared to 2021 figures. With the PSA saying that 16.4% or 4.51 million Filipino families are below the poverty threshold of P13,797 per month for a family of five. This is higher than the P12,082 in 2021, when poverty incidence was 18/1%. Taking the 6.2% inflation rate for most of 2023, food prices grew faster than the previous years, which renders the data suspect.
On the food threshold, P9,550 per month was needed for a family of five to meet basic food needs. This is higher by 18.10% from the P8,393 in 2021, as inflation pushed prices of food and basic commodities higher. Taking this figure alone, each family member would spend P1,910 per month to survive or P65.60 per day, or P21.86 per meal. Where can you find that dirt-cheap meal? It appears that the NEDA and PSA chiefs do not go the talipapa, the grocery and the wet markets. Their figures suck.
Ibon Foundation executive director Sonny Africa told Rappler said that a better comparison would be between 2023 figures and those of 2018. “Poverty only seems lower because it’s compared to when the economy was locked down,” he explained. In 2018, the poverty incidence among Filipino families was estimated at 16.1%. “Compared to the first semester of 2018, there are 3 million more poor Filipinos or 472,000 more poor families– even by the unrealistically low poverty line of just P91 per person per day.”
Poverty incidence refers to the number of Filipino individuals or families whose per capita income is insufficient to meet basic food and non-food needs. Compared to 2021, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the poverty incidence was 18.1%. Government to do away with self-congratulatory stories and statistics and concentrate on combating poverty by building industries to create more jobs, and modernize agriculture and mobilize at least 7-million landless peasants.