DOES anyone know what the term “food poor” means?
As far as I know, a person is considered poor if he or she is part of a household whose income falls below the poverty line.
And if he or she is considered poor, then he is most likely to have money to buy food, meaning that he or she is most likely to experience hunger. Not just him or her, but his or her entire household.
In reality, the government measures only the “poverty rate:, and not the “hunger rate”, because there is really no such thing as a “hunger rate”.
Perhaps the closest data that is closest data sets that are closest to the concept of a “hunger rate” are the results of a “perceived hunger” survey, a survey that does not really collect statistical data about who actually experience hunger, but instead, it measures who believe that they have experienced hunger within a given period.
In a manner of speaking, I am familiar with quantitative measures about who are considered being “poor” in general, but not about being “food poor” in particular.
At best, I think that measures about “perceived hunger” are qualitative in nature, and are therefore not indicative of the true statistical “picture” of actual poverty.
The science of measuring hunger and poverty might have changed since I graduated from the University of the Philippines, but as far as I understand it, if a person falls below the “poverty line”, he or she is probably unable to buy food, because food as a commodity is part of the “imaginary basket of goods” that determines whether a person is above or below the “poverty line”.
Perhaps someday, when I will meet someone who has more Economics units than I have, I will understand what the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) meant when they said that if a household of five could spend about P320 per day, they could not be considered as “food poor”.
Does that mean, however, that they are already above the “poverty line”? That they also could not be considered as “income poor”?/PN
