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By Rommel C. Lontayao, Reporter
More than half a million Filipino
families did not have anything to eat for at least a day in June
2008, results of the latest Pulse Asia survey revealed.
“An estimated 3 percent of
Filipino households, or 530,000 households, had one or more of their
members [went] without food for at least one whole day in the month
preceding the survey,” the survey said. The survey was conducted
from July 1 to 18.
The households went hungry
primarily “because [they] had no money to buy food.”
Ninety percent of these
households, Pulse Asia noted, belonged to classes D2 and E, the
vulnerable poor and poor classes.
The survey also found that more
Filipino households had been cutting back on food consumption and
expenditures in the face of double-digit inflation rates for food.
Inflation reached a 17-year high
of 12.2 percent in July, the National Statistics Office reported
Tuesday.
The Pulse Asia survey said,
“Two in three Filipino households [66 percent] say they are
consuming less or spending less on food, an increase of 22
percentage points over the March 2008 figure of 44 percent.”
“Reduced food consumption or
spending is more widespread [from 61 percent to 75 percent] in areas
outside the National Capital Region [Metro Manila] and among
socioeconomic classes D [66 percent] and E [71 percent],” the
survey added.
This does not mean, however, that
class ABC households and those in Metro Manila did not feel the
impact of the double-digit inflation rates. Pulse Asia, in this
case, reported that about half of these hungry households also said
that they had been reducing food consumption.
These households also had been
reducing consumption of commodities and spending on services.
About one in four households (24
percent) said that they had cut back on rice consumption or
spending. Also, about half of Filipino families (53 percent) said
they also had reduced electric consumption, while about a third said
that they had reduced their expenditures on transportation and
transport fuel, and on liquefied petroleum gas (LPG).
According to the survey, the
increase in number of households cutting back on transportation and
transport fuel expenditures was greatest in balance Luzon, meaning
the whole island except Metro Manila, (from 11 percent in March 2008
to 31 percent) and in Mindanao (from 21 percent to 47 percent).
Some 22 percent of the households
with cellular phones reduced their expenditures on cellphone load.
Pulse Asia said its July 2008
Nationwide Survey on Coping with Double-Digit Inflation Rates was
conducted from July 1 to 18 using face-to-face interviews with 1,200
representative adults 18 years old and older, with a plus or minus 3
percent error margin at the 95-percent confidence level at the
national level, and plus or minus 6 percent error margin for each of
geographic areas covered in the survey.
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