MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Agriculture (DA) must be a major force in attaining our economic development through nutrition. This was the conclusion that the Alyansa Agrikultura reached after the Dec. 11 hearing conducted jointly by five committees at the House of Representatives. The hearing’s agenda included the critical issue of nutrition.

A lead resource person for this was Regis Chapman, head of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) Philippines. He pointed out that good nutrition is necessary for economic development and that the national school feeding program has a very high return on investment.

This is supported by the World Bank when it stated: “For every dollar invested in addressing malnutrition, a return of $23 is expected. The economic benefits of nutrition far outweigh the costs of inaction.”

Fortunately, our inaction was partly corrected last year with an P11-billion budget for school feeding last year. This was significantly increased by 50 percent to P16 billion this year. This past nutrition inaction has had disastrous consequences.

Learning poverty

The WFP website states: “The Philippines is among the countries grappling with extremely high learning poverty. Nine out of 10 children aged 10 years and older are unable to read and understand the age-appropriate text. The national learning poverty rate in the Philippines (9 percent) is much higher than the average for East Asia and the Pacific region (3 percent).”

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A key to solving this is identified: “Children require optimal nutrition to think, learn, and require skills that will fully develop their potential. The Philippines still faces the burden of malnutrition.”

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In the feeding program of the ADMU 616569 Foundation, which has so far covered 350,000 schoolchildren, three deficiencies were identified. First, when a feeding program targets only the malnourished, there is a social stigma on these participants, which limits the program’s effectiveness.

Second, the national feeding program covered only the first half of 2023, losing the gains achieved then over the second half (thankfully, this was corrected for 2024). Third, the program must not only measure physical accomplishment, such as increases in weight and height, but also academic achievement in grade improvement for subjects such as mathematics, science, and English.

However, what has been missing in the discussions is the emphasis on a circular economy. This means a model of production and consumption, which involves sharing, reusing and recycling. The materials are kept within the economy and reused to create further value.

For the school feeding program, this means sourcing the food from the community instead of importing and relying on distant sources. The waste from the feeding program can then be used as fertilizer for the farmers.

Other opportunities arise when using the circular economy approach. The WFP states that an innovative Home Grown School Feeding “promotes nutrition and learning for schoolchildren while linking with local smallholder farmers to procure food. It creates market opportunities for these farmers.”

The DA’s role

DA Undersecretary Cheryl Caballero is now taking steps for the DA to be more involved with the Department of Education’s (DepEd) school feeding program. The DA now plans to provide farmers who will provide the food for the program with assistance in production, technology transfer, logistics, marketing and possibly even credit.

Caballero is now spearheading an effort to build on the current DepEd Gulayan sa Paaralan and LGU Gulayan sa Barangay with a supporting DA Gulayan sa Bayan. This will also use a mass-based household and community approach involving several government and private sector partners to address our severe malnutrition problem. This will link to the school feeding program to achieve our government’s stated objective “to expand the national school feeding program to reach 32 million children and create transformative change for 1.6 million smallholder farmers and families by 2028.”

Indonesia plans to spend P266 billion on its school feeding program next year. This is more than 10 times our budget for the same objective. Our poverty learning rate is 91 percent, almost twice worse than Indonesia’s 53 percent. But if we are constrained by a low budget, the DA must work more closely with the DepEd using a circular economy framework to achieve physical and academic achievement, which must be paired with farmer improvement and empowerment. This way, our economic development will then be hastened.