Does anyone know
what the term "food poor" means? As far as I know, a person is
considered poor if he or she is part of a household whose income falls below
the poverty line. And if he or she is considered poor, then he is most likely not
to have enough money to buy food, meaning that he or she is most likely to
experience hunger. Not just him or her, but his or her entire household.
In reality, the government measures only the "poverty
rate", and not the "hunger rate", because there is really no
such thing as a "hunger rate". Perhaps the closest data that is
closest data sets that are closest to the concept of a "hunger rate"
are the results of a "perceived hunger" survey, a survey that does
not really collect statistical data about who actually experience hunger, but
instead, it measures who believe that they have experienced hunger within a
given period.
In a manner of speaking, I am familiar with quantitative measures
about a who are considered being "poor" in general, but not about
being "food poor" in particular. At best, I think that measures about
"perceived hunger" are qualitative in nature, and are therefore not
indicative of the true statistical "picture" of actual poverty. The
science of measuring hunger and poverty might have changed since I graduated
from the University of the Philippines, but as far as I understand it, if a
person falls below the "poverty line", he or she is probably unable
to buy food, because food as a commodity is part of the "imaginary basket
of goods" that determines whether a person is above or below the
"poverty line". Perhaps someday, when I will meet someone who has
more Economics units than I have, I will understand what the Philippine
Statistics Authority (PSA) meant when they said that if a household of five
could spend about PHP320 per day, they could not be considered as "food
poor". Does that mean however that they are already above the
"poverty line"? That they also could not be considered as
"income poor"?
Materials recovery facilities
It may sound like
an unusual suggestion, but what if we pass a law that will require LGUs to haul
garbage directly to materials recovery facilities (MRFs) and not to sanitary
landfills? Others might say that this suggestion is impractical, because many
LGUs do not even have MRFs, and many of them do not have sanitary landfills
either. But what logic are we pursuing here? Are we saying that we should not
run after the LGUs simply because they do not have MRFs? And that they do not
have sanitary landfills? Is that not like saying that we should no longer run
after criminals simply because our jails are already full? Or that we do not
have enough policemen to run after them?
Sad to say, some of our LGU officials have not even thought of
building their own MRFs, otherwise all of them would have it by now. In much
the same way, they may not have thought of building sanitary landfills,
assuming they would know what that means. It appears however that there are
actually three points of failure here, namely the point of segregation at home,
the point of bringing the recyclables to the MRF, and the point of bringing the
non-recyclables to the sanitary landfills. Perhaps I might be asking for the
impossible, but what if we, the taxpaying public, will demand that the
government should lead the way in segregation and MRF implementation? There are
more than enough military camps and school campuses where the government could
lead by example in implementing the proper ways of waste management via recycling.
Understandably, It is much easier for the government to make the laws and it is
harder for them to implement them. However, who else but the LGUs and the national
government agencies (NGAs) should lead the whole country in implementing these
laws? Doing so is better than the government becoming the law breaker in
contrast to their being the law maker.