Defining what is 'food poor'

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.