Grumbling gut issues

Grumbling gut issues | Daily Tribune

Nor can the government obscure the hardship with its controversial single-digit poverty rate, which critics have questioned for relying on a poverty threshold that may not reflect the true cost of living. The numbers may be massaged, but not hunger.

The flagship cash assistance scheme, Unified Package for Livelihoods, Industry, Food and Transport (UPLIFT), reaches 7.6 million on paper, but only 5.6 million have actually been served.

As a result, the poorest sector of the population is suffering the most from rising commodity prices.

Rice now costs P49.80 a kilo, up from P40.43 a year ago. Rice inflation alone has hit 19.4 percent, the highest since the 20.9-percent spike of July 2024.

Liquefied petroleum gas, which most everyone uses for cooking, is up 29.6 percent. A household tank that cost P800 to P1,070 last year now runs P988 to P1,498. Electricity ticked up, too.

The poorest 30 percent of Filipino households are absorbing 8.2-percent inflation based on a basket of essential goods and services. A year ago, it was at negative 0.6 percent.

The daily minimum wage moves laggardly and has been stuck at P750 in Metro Manila and around P500 outside it. A family of five needs at least P1,300 a day to live decently.

The shortfall is P795, more than the wage itself, based on a study by the independent think tank Ibon Foundation. Three in five working Filipinos hold jobs that are not secure, informal and underpaid.

The study found that 7.7 million families survive on P12,835 a month, or about just over P400 a day, which are households deciding between rice and medicine or between transport fare to work and a meal at home.

Contrast this with what the government has chosen to spend its energy on this year: impeachment maneuvering, factional warfare, and public relations operations that the public is being made witness to.

A flood control scandal exposes plunder on a scale that mocks the situation of most of the population, who suffer the miserable effects of flooding.

The Palace has been consumed by the business of staying in power, managing alliances, narratives and confronting the Duterte question, while the business of feeding the people has to wait.

The real scandal, larger than what comes out in the public hearings at the House of Representatives or at the Senate impeachment court, is felt in the gut.

Many patronage assistance schemes, or ayuda, only cover up the state of abandonment and do nothing to improve the people’s economic prospects.

What is missing is the will to follow the development blueprint — which the administration designed at the start of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s term.

A government fixated on its own survival has little bandwidth left for the survival of the people it governs. An administration that once promised unity and economic revival has morphed into one increasingly consumed by a single imperative: self-preservation.

The 22-million households struggling with worsening poverty care little about who dominates the political stage.

Their concerns are more immediate: the price of a kilo of rice, the cost of filling a gas tank, and why both seem to take an ever bigger bite out of their incomes.

They experience abandonment not in political speeches or economic charts, but in the shrinking contents of their plastic bags with every trip to the palengke.