Hunger declines among food stamp program beneficiaries - survey
Metro Manila, Philippines - Hunger among beneficiaries of the food stamp program has seen a decline in six months, according to a government-commissioned survey released on Wednesday, Sept. 3.
From 48.7 percent in October 2024, the Social Weather Station (SWS) said the rate went down to 44.6 percent in December 2024, and 41.5 percent in March, or a 7.2 percentage point decline within six months.
The SWS is tracking the self-rated hunger rate among 300,000 beneficiaries of the “Walang Gutom” program of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD).
The private sector tapped the pollster on behalf of the DSWD.
Piloted in July 2023, the “Walang Gutom” provides low-income households monthly food credits of P3,000 to buy a select list of food commodities from participating stores.
“The rate of improvement among beneficiaries was six percentage points higher than for non-beneficiaries,” Roehl Briones, a SWS fellow, said in a Malacañang briefing with Social Welfare Secretary Rex Gatchalian.
“Meaning, the changes can be confidently attributed to the program itself rather than other socioeconomic trends,” he said.
Briones said the biggest improvement was in the “BARMM Plus” cluster with a 17.2-point reduction, from a 55.1 percent baseline to 37.7 percent.
Hunger in other areas covered by the program was also in a downward direction.
Briones said there were improvements in self-rated food threshold, severe food insecurity, and food diversity and food quality scores between the surveys conducted in December and March.
“On the whole, evidence is consistently pointing to the positive impact of scaling up the ‘Walang Gutom’ program to the food poor population of the country,” he said.
Gatchalian said the DSWD is aiming to expand the program to 600,000 beneficiaries by year-end, with the addition of 150,000 next year.
The DSWD is targeting to free 750,000 food poor families, or those who were not able to meet their basic food needs, from hunger by 2027.
PH’s June hunger rate
Meanwhile, on a nationwide scale, the SWS reported 16.1 percent of Filipino families experienced involuntary hunger at least once in the past three months.
The hunger rate fell from April’s 20 percent.
The SWS interviewed 1,200 adults from June 25 to 29 for the nationwide survey.
The pollster said the sampling error margins were ±3 percent for national percentages and ±6 percent each for Metro Manila, Balance Luzon, the Visayas, and Mindanao.
For both “Walang Gutom” survey and nationwide poll, the SWS asked: “Nitong nakaraang tatlong buwan, nangyari po ba kahit minsan na ang inyong pamilya ay nakaranas ng gutom at wala kayong makain?”
[Translation: In the last three months, did it happen even once that your family experienced hunger and did not have anything to eat?]
