In a country battered by hunger caused by extreme poverty, one cannot help but to blame overpopulation.
A recent study conducted by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) revealed that the root cause of poverty is overpopulation—vindicating the fact that the Philippine population is growing each year at an unimaginable pace. Today, about 80 millions Filipinos are scattered unevenly throughout the archipelago, and was expected to balloon to 100 million in the next 14 years as asserted by the National Statistics Office.
Likewise, the 2004 National Demographic Survey concluded that the richest 20 percent of the population have an average of two children, while the poorest 20 percent have an average of six. Simply put, the more children you have, the more mouths to feed.
The present situation, however, is more desperate in urban areas than those in rural. It is, then, presumptuous to claim that food is more abundant in the rural areas because, geographically speaking, agriculture is their main industry. Food is always at hand.
In some cases, rural areas sometimes suffer from starvation. It is ironic that the very places that produce rice for the metropolitan are the same ones that experience from deprivation.
There is no denying this phenomenon, aided by the fact that the Philippines ranked 5th out of 55 countries in 2008 Gallup International survey’s on hungriest nations in the world.
In a broader scope, about 24,000 people die every day from hunger or hunger-related causes worldwide. Seen this way, the problem on starvation is more ominious than the problems on AIDS, corruption, and wars.
Hunger, after all, is just an end product of the vicious cycle of society’s asymmetrical design. For when there are vast number of unemployed citizens, uneducated young minds, government mismanagement and corruption, and overpopulation, there is poverty. And, poverty causes nothing but hunger.
In the grand scheme of things, the only and the best way to combat the co-existence of hunger and poverty is to combat unemployment, uneducation, government negligence, and overpopulation one by one by one.#
