Poverty in urban areas in the Philippines could worsen as climate change would make basic food items more expensive, according to the latest report from the World Bank.
In its latest report titled Shock Waves: Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty, the World Bank said higher food prices would increase the ranks of the urban poor by 32 percent.
“A climate-induced rise in food prices could increase poverty rates of nonagricultural households by 20 percent to 50 percent in parts of Africa and Asia,” the World Bank said. “With increasing urbanization rates, food-price increases could have an even more severe poverty impact.”
Poverty incidence among urban households may also increase to 111 percent in Malawi; 102 percent in Zambia; 95 percent in Mexico; and 31 percent in Bangladesh
To address the possible impact of climate change on food prices, the World Bank urged governments to provide safety nets that will allow the poor to cope.
Safety nets are key since the World Bank expects that apart from poverty, income inequality will also widen due to climate change.
“There will be an impact on poverty and inequality because poor people [1] are more often affected by these negative shocks or trends [they are more exposed]; [2] lose more when affected, relative to their income or wealth [they are more vulnerable]; and [3] receive less support from family, friends, and community, and have less access to financial tools or social safety nets to help prevent, prepare for, and manage impacts,” the World Bank said.
Fortunately for the Philippines, the World Bank said, the government’s conditional cash transfer (CCT) is considered one of the most advanced in the world.
The country’s CCT Program was tested in the wake of massive devastation wrought by Supertyphoon Yolanda. The CCT was used to coordinate and implement postdisaster support.
Yolanda displaced 4.1 million people and increased national poverty incidence by 1.9 percent, or an additional 1 million people falling into poverty.
The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), which implements the CCT, also has a Disaster Affected Family Assistance Card to monitor CCT beneficiaries and the Listahanan, a national registry used to target CCT beneficiaries and recipients of other government social programs.
The DSWD also has the CCT Beneficiary Update List (BUL), a subset of the Listahanan. The BUL is updated every two months and contains information on poor households.
The government agency also has the CCT Grievance Redress System, a component of the CCT that allows direct queries, clarifications, complaints, grievances, and appeals to the appropriate CCT committees.
“The Philippines has one of the most advance SP system—backed with advanced information and delivery systems—in the East Asia Pacific region, designed to help poor households manage risk and shocks,” the report stated.
University of the Philippines School of Statistics Dean Dennis Mapa earlier explained that the poorest Filipinos are very sensitive to food prices.
Mapa said this can be explained by the difference in the inflation felt by all households and the inflation experienced by the bottom 30 percent or the poorest Filipinos.
He explained that the weight of food in the basket of goods used for the computation of the inflation experienced by the poorest 30 percent is 70 percent against 39 percent for all the households.
In the third quarter of 2015, the poorest Filipinos or the bottom 30 percent of the population saw inflation slowing to 0.5 percent.
Data obtained from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) showed that inflation for the poorest Filipinos was the slowest since the third quarter of 2009, when inflation was at 0.2 percent.
The PSA said inflation for the bottom 30 percent of households was recorded at 2.1 percent in the second quarter of 2015 and 6.8 percent in the same quarter last year.