IN the past 25 years, the world achieved great strides toward reducing hunger and undernourishment.
The Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) 2015 State of Food Insecurity in the World (Sofi) showed that there are 216 million fewer undernourished people—those unable to acquire enough food to meet their daily minimum dietary requirements over one year—throughout the world today compared to 1990. This is notwithstanding the 1.9-billion increase in the world population observed in the same period.
The Philippines contributed to these positive results, being among 79 out of 129 nations who reached one sub-target (MDG1c) under the Millennium Development Goals and halved the proportion of their undernourished populations.
A recent Social Weather Stations survey echoes this, reporting that hunger incidence—the percentage of respondents who claimed they experienced having nothing to eat at least once in the past three months—was at the lowest we have seen in the last 10 years.
However, we did not reach the World Food Summit’s goal of halving the number of hungry—or chronically undernourished—people. Where 16.7 million Filipinos were without adequate food in 1990, that number dropped only to 13.7 million by 2014. In the same period, the number of hungry people in Thailand fell from 19.8 million to 5.0 million, while the drop was 32.1 million to 10.3 million in Vietnam.
The irony is that those who produce food—farmers, fishermen and other agricultural workers—are more likely to be among the hungry, given they are also among the most vulnerable and impoverished.
To be fair, this reality is not limited to the Philippines as nearly three-quarters of the 795 million hungry people in the world today live in rural areas and are dependent on agriculture for livelihood.
There are 570 million farms globally and up to 90 percent of them are reliant on individual families for labor. Eighty-four percent of such family farms are no bigger than 2 hectares, yet such small plots of land are responsible for nearly 70 percent of the world’s agricultural production.
The 2015 Sofi report notes that higher agricultural labor productivity (a logarithm of agricultural value added per agricultural worker) is generally associated with less prevalent undernourishment.
The report continues to say that growing family farming and smallholder agriculture improves general welfare by making food more available and by increasing farmer incomes. This could be achieved through credit assistance, crop insurance, market access, agricultural extension, subsidies and perhaps even direct government procurement from small farmers. Simply, making family farms more productive remains a key poverty- and hunger-reduction strategy.
In fact, noted journalist Joe Studwell pins Philippine underdevelopment in part to its failure to make smallholder farms (which he calls garden farms) efficient, productive and competitive.
In his 2013 book, How Asia Works, Studwell noted that our vast sugar plantations produced an average 56 tons per hectare, compared to the 85 to 90 tons per hectare once produced in Taiwan, which he championed as one of the region’s exemplars in family farming.
He cited 2009 FAO data that showed the Philippines having average per hectare yields of 3.8 tons and 2.6 tons for rice and corn, respectively, compared to Taiwan’s 4.8 tons and 3.8 tons.
As of 2014, up to 5.7 million farms in the Philippines are family-owned and operated, with many of them still engaged in subsistence farming. Such family farms ought to be supported, given their frontline role in resolving hunger in the Philippines.
E-mail: angara.ed@gmail.com.