Jimbo Albano / BusinessMirror

EVEN before the Department of Education (DepEd) moves to re-bid its billion-peso megadeal for a supplier of nutrient-fortified noodles for millions of public-school children, that agency, along with the health department, would do well to revisit the cost-efficiency of its vitamin-fortified campaigns among poor communities, especially those coursed through schools.

We raise this issue because, as the allegations that led to the cancellation of the DepEd’s contract with the supplier of fortified noodles have shown, the cost accepted by a DepEd panel for each unit was way above reasonable; and as the Senate inquiry under Sen. Mar Roxas showed, the goods as labeled and for which the taxpayers would have paid were not really the ones packaged and delivered. Moreover, the contract with the freight forwarder was also dubious, way above the costs for which the DepEd pays for shipping books to the remotest village schools.

Officials have encouraged such “fortified” or “enriched” foodstuff for our poor pupils, many of them in varying degrees of malnutrition, with the noble intent of improving their physical and mental health, and thus give them an even chance to compete with the rest of the country and the world. Noodles were used as medium for delivering the nutrients, so the conventional wisdom goes, because they are popular with the poor. But no one has really checked, it appears, whether the “fortified” or “enriched” food being peddled to them has been drastically salt-reduced. Most experts of kidney, hypertension or metabolic ailments, now so common among the poor when they were tagged in decades past as “diseases of the rich,” will tell you that the sudden spike in the number of kidney, liver, diabetes and cardiovascular ailments among the poor are rooted in  those cheap diets they desperately resort to.  In many cases, poor households will scrimp on food—by, ironically, stocking up on salt- or fat- or sugar-laden stuff because these are cheap—just to save enough money to buy the expensive maintenance drugs needed by one or two, often elderly, members of the family.

In another stark irony, several of the nutrition wonders (like the “malunggay noodles”) now being touted in public schools, and mass-produced by private business, were developed by the Department of Science and Technology and the Food and Nutrition Research Institute (FNRI), so why should government agencies shell out billions of pesos to buy them?

Why, indeed, should the public-school system have to buy overpriced, “fortified” noodles and similar stuff, when such nutritional supplementation—whose necessity we don’t dispute—could be substantially derived by encouraging a network of backyard gardens in many, still-idle lands of state schools?  Every now and then some official spouts the wisdom of backyard gardening, a trend that has caught up around the world (they even grow rice atop some skyscrapers in Japan). And yet here, no government agency has seriously encouraged it, despite the well-documented nutritional benefits from easy-to-plant, quickly-harvestable vegetables and fruits like malunggay, kangkong, alugbati, camote tops, calamansi, ampalaya, etc. The list is long, and in home-economics classes teachers echo the old folks’ admonition for children to eat fruits and vegetables to stay healthy. Yet what do you know—the same schools peddle overpriced—but “fortified” noodles and similar stuff.

Beyond planning to re-bid the disgraced noodle program, perhaps education and health authorities should consult with the FNRI and the agriculture department, which has been touting malunggay the past two years, on how to integrate school gardens into the pupil-nutrition program. That’s the best way to give meaning to the celebration of Nutrition Month this July.