BY IKE SEÑERES
PARDON me if I make some mistakes in my analysis here, because I graduated from the University of the Philippines with a degree in political science, and not economics.
As a matter of fact, I only have six units of economics. Because of that, I have to get out of my way to make additional research, before I touch on economic topics in my essays.
As far as I can recall, the conventional method of measuring poverty was whether or not a person would fall below the poverty line or not, based on his or her ability to afford the so-called “imaginary basket of goods”, meaning all the contents of that “imaginary basket”.
As I understand it, that “basket” includes not only food, but many other non-food items, including housing costs.
Very recently, the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) issued a statement that “spending only P64 on food per day does not classify one as food poor”. If multiplied by an index of five, that would amount to P320 per day.
That statement somehow confused me, because I am familiar with “poor” as generally understood, but not with “food poor”.
I got confused because I am familiar with separating hunger data and poverty data, and not combining the two data sets into one. There could be other ways of doing it, but I am only familiar with surveys that measure “perceived hunger”, wherein respondents are asked whether they have “experienced” hunger within a given period.
Perhaps in that case, “experience” probably means not having anything to eat during that given period. As I understand it, a person who falls below the so-called “poverty line” is bound to go hungry, because he or she could not afford to buy the contents of the “imaginary basket”?, contents that includes food items.
What I am saying is that a poor person should be expected to also become a hungry person. So what does the PSA mean by “food poor”?/PN
