ONCE more the latest report of the Social Weather Stations (SWS)—which, after BusinessWorld had exclusive first rights to it yesterday, becomes ccessible to all today—shows that more Filipino families see themselves as poor (“mahirap”).

The SWS conducted the survey on Dec 8 to 11. It did face-to-face interviews of 1,200 adults divided into random samples of 300 each in Metro Manila, Balance of Luzon, the Visayas, and Mindanao. As usual, the sampling error margins were ±3% for national and ±6% for area percentages.

This survey found that 54 percent of the respondents, which translates to 10.9 million households out of 20.2 million in the entire country (per 2010 count), consider themselves poor. This result is 7 points higher than found in the previous survey in August 2012. In that survey only 47 percent of all respondents (about 9.5 million households) said they viewed themselves as “mahirap.” The December survey’s 54 percent finding of poverty is also 2 points higher than the 52 percent household-poverty average for the whole of 2012.

Self-rated food poverty is up
According to the SWS, self-rated food poverty was found in this survey to have risen to 44 percent (estimated to be 8.9 million families) from only 35 percent (7.2 million families) in the August 2012 survey?

What gives? There’s something amiss.

These food-poverty statistics fly in the face of the SWS report on hunger released last week, on January 10.

How can 8.9 families claim to be food-poor to the SWS researchers on the days of December 8 to 11, 2012, when these same researchers found in the same period and the same survey that only 16.3 percent of Filipino families (about 3.3 million households) experienced having nothing to eat?

This finding of a huge decline in hungry Filipino families was the cause of great rejoicing among Filipinos (including the editors of this paper). Of course, President Benigno S. C. Aquino 3rd’s officials were euphoric. The hunger findings, they said, proved that the administration’s anti-poverty and anti-hunger efforts were producing results.

The self-rated poverty increased nationwide except in the Visayas, which recorded a 1 point drop in the survey. This negates the notion that bad weather, typhoons, heavy rains and flooding made people perceive themselves to be poor. For some of the key Visayas provinces were badly hit by these natural calamities, much more so than Metro Manila where self-rated poverty rose by 15 points to 72 percent.

Unemployment surge must be the reason
The best projections say the Philippines is likely to grow by 6 percent this year. This good Gross Domestic Product growth rate continues to make the Philippines one of the most dynamic countries in the world, together with India and China. Our GDP growth rate was 7.1 percent in the third quarter of 2012 and that made the Philippines shoot up as an investment destination. All over the world economists praised the Aquino administration. And the ratings agencies as a result raised our rating to just a couple of notches below investment grade.

Amid all this good news, however, there is the dark employment picture. Unemployment is really 10 percent, although the government has been reporting a lower figure of 6.8 percent unemployment by registering a low labor force participation rate. This massaging also being done by the Obama administration to show that US unemployment is not really high. Raise the number of person who are not looking for jobs and you have a low unemployment figure. The reality is that millions are no longer looking for jobs because they have been rejected so many times.

One serious finding is that at the time Philippine GDP hit a phenomenal 7.1 percent in the last quarter of 2012, almost a million jobs—882,000—disappeared from the economy. This raised the unemployment rate to 6.91 percent, higher than the 2011 figure of 6.4 percent.

This leads to suspicions about the boom-economy figures.

And it explains why at the time when the SWS survey found that millions of Filipino families said they did not experience hunger they also said that they were food-poor and rated themselves as “mahirap.”

Another consideration is that even the World Bank has called for caution in viewing the 7.1 percent 3rd Quarter GDP rate too jubilantly.

It seems that because of a “statistical discrepancy” the true growth figure could be as low as 5.7 percent. (Rigoberto D. Tiglao quoting the World Bank’s December 2012 “Philippine Economic Update.”

This means that, as the World Bank itself laid out in a table, our country is not forecast to be the highest growing economy in Asean in 2013 but Cambodia (6.6 percent). Below Cambodia is Indonesia (6.3 percent), the Philippines (6 percent), Malaysia (5.2 percent). Myanmar (5 percent) and Thailand (4.5 percent).