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Two lady solons on Monday said the country’s rice
supply problem should not jeopardize the government’s
Food-for-School program, which serves hot meals to schoolchildren
or rewards them with a kilo of rice for every day of school
attended.
“Children must have first
priority over rice stocks,” North Cotabato Rep. Emmylou
“Lala” Taliño-Mendoza said, adding that the National Food Authority
(NFA) must not stop supporting the program.
With school set to open in two
months, rice from incoming NFA stocks should be earmarked in
advance for the program.
Mendoza stressed the government
has appropriated P2.8 billion in the 2008 national budget for
various feeding programs that will benefit three million daycare and
elementary school pupils.
For her part, Iloilo Rep. Janette
Garin argued that food intervention programs have been successful
in bringing down malnutrition rates and improving school
attendance.
The Iloilo lawmaker said the
Education department’s report of September 2007 showed the
proportion of children with below normal nutritional classification
status went down “from 20 percent last year to 17 percent in just
one year.”
She pointed out that
strengthening in-school feeding programs can sustain the
reduction in the number of underweight children, which went down
from 34.5 percent in 1990 to 24.6 percent in 2005, based on a 2005
report of the Department of Science and Technology.
--Jomar Canlas
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