Two faces of economic distress confronted the Filipino people during the second quarter of 2008. The first was the opinion poll result showing that President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s public satisfaction rating had sunk to a record low for two decades, making her the most reviled Filipino president since the end of the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship in 1986. The second, which was of more direct consequence to the poor segments of the population, was the finding in the same survey with different frameworks (by the poll group Social Weather Stations) that more Filipino families experienced hunger due to lack of food between April and June than during the first three months of 2008. The two findings are somehow intertwined in that hunger translates into rising public discontent over the availability of food.

These findings pose a challenge to administration to roll back the slide of its net public satisfaction rating and to reduce the incidence of hunger. These specters confront the government as the President prepares to deliver her State of the Nation Address (SONA) on Monday, her second to the last, assuming nothing eventful cuts short her term. One can never be certain, given the volatility engendered by heightening economic distress.

Although the President is less beleaguered this time by threats of political turbulence stemming from coup plots, impeachment complains and street protests, she faces more acute and more socially unsettling economic issues posed by inflation. These issues require immediate relief for a public that is reeling from the relentless assault of rising fuel and food prices.

The nation will be waiting for a new package of policy responses she will offer in the SONA to help people cope with the worst inflation rate in her seven-year long and turbulent presidency. The SONA will be delivered against the backdrop of a record inflation rate of 11.4 percent in June from a year ago, the fastest inflation rate recorded in 14 years. This is an economic circumstance that makes this year’s SONA different and more socially volatile than the SONAs of the past seven years. Pressures for relief from inflation are stronger this year than in previous years, and the public is watching whether the President will offer a policy package that includes measures beyond short-term palliatives that have so far characterized the administration’s responses to the inflation.

The President on Monday will paint a state of the nation to a population that is more hungry than it had been in previous years. The survey shows that households reporting having experienced hunger at least once in the past three months rose to 16.3 percent (an estimated 2.9 million families). This is four percentage points above the 10-year average rate of 12.1 percent. The survey refers to “involuntary hunger” (due to lack of food). The rising incidence of hunger is associated with the jump of the inflation rate in June.

Not surprisingly, the administration offered the same explanation for the hunger incidence as for the steep fall of the President’s satisfaction rating. Press Secretary Jesus Dureza said, “We look at this [rise in the number of hungry people] as a result of the nationwide crisis that is global in origin.”

Malacañang said the President was implementing measures, including billion-peso subsidies, to help people cope with rising food and fuel prices.

Any presidential claim that the administration has improved the lot of the people over the past seven years and that the country is more prosperous than it was in 2001 will not remain uncontradicted. Already critics, among them former National Treasurer Leonor Briones, have criticized the President’s cash transfer program in the form of subsidies. She said the subsidies were only a “one-shot strategy that only ensures political gains.”

Anticipating claims that the President had fulfilled her promises in previous SONAs to reduce poverty, Briones observed:

“The President said she fulfilled her promises in solving hunger and poverty by achieving 90 percent rice self-sufficiency from 2001-2007, 4,000 farm-to-market roads, and 146,117 new irrigation systems. Yet, data from the National Statistics Coordinating Board reveal that 12.2 million Filipinos are food poor and 27.6 million are below the poverty threshold.

“Moreover, the President said that she fulfilled her promise of creating 9 million jobs from 2001 to 2008. Yet, data from the Bureau of Labor and Employment Statistics shows that the unemployment rate is now at 8 percent, with 2.9 million jobless people. A total of 168,000 net jobs were lost since April last year.”

Briones added, “Whatever gains have been made have been erased by rising prices of oil, food and basic commodities. What matters in governance is not the output … but its impact on the lives of the people.”

This standard of measuring accomplishment with promise has been superseded by the spike of food and fuel prices. The steep plunge of the President’s satisfaction rating has called for new responses to the inflation. There will be little to cheer in the coming SONA. It will be measured with new terms of reference, defined by more exacting demands from the public for immediate and more substantial economic relief.

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