HUNGER

October 26, 2026

According to reports released by the Social Weather Survey, 10.4 percent of

Filipinos experienced involuntarily hunger from March to June of this year.

The Washington Post reported that an estimated 17 million American

households had problems finding enough food in 2022. Food Bank

estimated that 3.7 million Australians have run out of food last year.

Although food insecurity in the United States and Australia surprised me,

the existence of hunger in the Philippines surprised me even more. A friar

in centuries past referred to the Philippines as “La Tierra Abundancia”.

Throw any seed he said, and it will grow. It is not like Spain with its craggy,

dead dry land. The Philippines is rich in rain and sunshine. Why then the

hunger?

It maybe because of a combination of weather factors, lack of government

support, limited financial resources because Filipinos prefer to work

somewhere else, finding the backbreaking work on their parents

unpalatable. Infrastructure is also partiality to blame because sometimes

food is thrown to rot because it cannot be transported to the consumer.

The reasons are varied but the result is the same. The right of the people to

eat 3 meals a day is frustrated.

Hunger is the oldest problem of mankind. Its existence is often ignored or

even denied by dictatorial governments as the great Ukraine famine

imposed by the Russian State from 1932-1933 or the famine that China

experienced between 1958 to 1962, wherein, it is said, a staggering thirty

million Chinese perished all because Mao Tse Tung decided to initiate The

Great Leap Forward so that one fine day China will overtake the major

economies of the world.

Martin Caparros, in his book on hunger wrote of the Hunger Plan devised by

the Nazis. According to the Hunger Plan, there were four levels of

nourishment formulated because an “inferior race needs less room, fewer

clothes, and less food than the German race.”

Those who were nourished were those the Nazis needed for collaboration.

The “insufficiently nourished” who were given one thousand calories per

day were the people who the Nazis wanted to keep alive. Those starved for

extermination were either Jews, Gypsies or Russian POWs.

The plan was implemented with unparalleled German efficiency in the

Warsaw Ghetto where the Jews were only given 184 calories per day, thus

making the German governor at that time to boast that the only thing that

will remain of the Jewish question is a cemetery.

Under these conditions, wrote Martin Caparros, a starving doctor from the

Warsaw Ghetto wrote a book entitled “Hunger Disease: Studies by the

Jewish Physicians in the Warsaw Ghetto.”

The prologue, written anonymously, said of the book’s purpose: “Men

without a future, in a final effort of will, decided to make a modest

contribution to the future. While death was attacking, those who remained

awaited their own death without giving up their task.”

In the end, after seeking for other remedies to alienate hunger like chopped

liver and cow’s blood, the starving doctors came out with the obvious

conclusion, that the “only rational therapy for hunger is food.”

In 1922 a Russian named Sorokin wrote a book entitled “Hunger as a Factor

of Human Affairs”, written while he was experiencing hunger himself.

Sorokin said: “For hunger, there is nothing sacred. It is blind and crushes

with the same strength the great and small, norms and convictions that are

opposed to its fulfillment.

When we are full, we preach the sanctity of property, but when we are

hungry, we can steal without the slightest hesitation. When we are full, we

convince ourselves that it is impossible for us to kill, steal, rape, cheat, lie,

prostitute ourselves. When we are hungry, we can do it all.”

In the Philippines, I do not think our hunger can be measured by the

Kwashiorkor type of hunger that could be seen with bloated belies. Our

people do not eat healthy foods, vegetables, lean meats, fruits, etc.

Malnourished mothers nurture malnourished children. A lot of our children

suffer from iron deficiency. In such a malady, red blood cells with

insufficient iron fails to produce sufficient hemoglobin thus insufficient

oxygen is transported to the blood.

Have you noticed that a lot of our people, especially the youngest among us,

appear to suffer from stunted growth? Blame it on malnourishment.

I once asked a young student what is the most pressing problem that our

people is facing. She said that it is the lack of critical thinking which would

enable us to vote wisely. Maybe the lack of critical thought came from the

clergy teaching us to intone repetitious prayers which they say has more

value that understanding the mechanics of the multiplication tables. Maybe

because it is due to the lack of proper education caused by a misdirected

education system. Or maybe, just maybe, it is due to iodine deficiency

which results in underdeveloped brains and consequently to lower IQ’s.

Our lack of critical intelligence means that we will continue to be governed

by our stomachs and not by our brains and that, you will agree, is not a very

good thing.