THE number of Filipinos going hungry has reached a record high during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the polling organization Social Weather Stations (SWS) found in its latest quarterly survey for September.
The number has been going up since May, two months after Metro Manila and the rest of Luzon were locked down under an Enhanced Community Quarantine. SWS said that by September, 7.6 million households did not have enough food to eat at least once in the previous three months. Of these 7.6 million households, 2.2 million reported experiencing “severe hunger,” SWS said
Last Tuesday, the World Bank (WB) reported the results of its own survey. It said some 2.7 million Filipinos will join the ranks of the poor in 2020 because of the triple shock of the pandemic, the loss of their jobs because of the restrictions imposed, and the series of destructive storms and typhoons.
Our government’s own assessment was that the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) contracted by 10 percent in the first three quarters of this year. It went into technical recession in the second quarter when the GDP declined by nine percent in the first six months of the year.
The Development Budget Coordination Committee (DBCC) – composed of the Department of Finance, Department of Budget and Management, National