The work of reducing poverty in the land is like letting drops of water fall on a rock; you hope to make a crack, but you do not know when.
— Anonymous

MAYPAJO, Caloocan City — Before anything else, let me greet our readers, supporters, fans and everyone out there, a Happy Chinese New Year of the Wood Snake—Gong Xi Fa Cai!

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LAST year, the World Bank (WB) reported that poverty in 2024 was 13.6 percent, down from 15.5 in 2023. But these figures do not align with the actual situation on the ground.
Accorfing to a Social Weather Stations (SWS), self-rated hunger nearly doubled in 2024 and the percentage of Filipinos who claimed they experienced 'involuntary hunger' was the same as the figure registered at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.
The latest data showed that 25.9 percent of Filipino families went hungry at least once in the past three months. It was higher by 3 points from the 22.9 percent registered in September 2024. More alarming is the fact that this is also the highest since the 30.7 percent reported during the controversial Covid-19 lockdown in the same month in 2020.
In 2004, the annual average hunger rate was 20.2 percent and this doubled in the annual average of 10.7 percent in 2023, just a shave of one point below the record annual average of 21.1 percent in 2020.
The December 2024 hunger rate comprised 18.7 percent of the respondents who said their families suffered from 'moderate hunger', up from 16.8 percent in September. Moreover, 7.2 percent claimed they experienced 'severe hunger', up from 6.1 percent in September.
But how is 'moderate hunger' defined?
The SWS said it is hunger that a family experiences "only once or a few times" in the last three months. On the other hand, 'severe hunger' is experienced by a family "often" or "always" in the last three months.
Going back the hunger rate in the country, 'alarm bells' should have alerted our government when self-rated hunger increased "among both poor and non-poor families" as it went up from 29.3 to 31.5 percent among poor families and rose from 13.8 percent to 16.3 percent among non-poor respondents.
This has been happening despite the fact that in the past two-and-a-half years, we have seen the Marcos Jr. administration tapping a bright economic team that hunkered down and began working as soon as they were sworn in. They mobilized the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) in rolling out several conditional cash transfer programs, known as 'ayuda', which targeted the poorest of the poor for financial subsidies, with conditionalities tied to neonatal and maternal health, children's attendance in schools and the family's immunization record.
Aside from the DSWD, The Technical Skills and Development Authority (TESDA) also opened more teaching centers where the youth and unemployed could take certification courses that are recognized globally. In support the Department of Labor and Employment (DoLE) rolled out job fairs and training programs to upskill our workers, even if it is not Labor Day.
In spite of all these initiatives, though, more—really much more—needs to be done.
In truth what deters efforts to alleviate poverty are corruption and weak education. The Management Association of the Philippine (MAP) has pointed out that these two issues are the top concerns of businesses for 2025. And the World Economic Forum has just weighed in that an economic downturn and poverty will be the 'twin boulders of Sisyphus' for the Philippines in the next two years.
If one recalls from our study of Greek mythology, Sisyphus was the founder and king of Ephyra (now known as Corinth), who revealed the god Zeus's abduction of Aegina to the river deity Asopus, thereby incurring the wrath of the king of the gods. His subsequent cheating of death earns him eternal punishment in the underworld where the gods forced him to roll an immense boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down every time it neared the top, repeating this action for eternity.
Through the classical influence on modern culture, tasks that are both laborious and futile are therefore described as Sisyphean—a situation that aptly depicts the problem of alleviating poverty faced by our President Ferdinand 'Bongbong' Marcos Jr. (PBBM).

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