Children on Philippine Island Still Dying of Starvation Despite Global Aid Effort

The children of Negros are still starving to death--490 of them last year, according to government figures.

The deaths continue even though tens of millions of dollars in international aid have been spent on the problem in the last two years.

Teresita Tiangao’s experience tells why. The other day she sat with her two children in the malnutrition ward of a hospital overflowing with critical cases, and she talked about her troubles.

Her husband, she said, was a tenant farmer on a sugar hacienda until he died last year of tuberculosis. She said he had no money for the medicines he needed. He could have borrowed the money from the landlord, but it would have indentured him for years more.

So her husband died, and several months later she took her two children to Bacolod Regional Hospital. The chart at the foot of the bed that the two children share indicated that May, 5, and Sixto, 2, were suffering from third-degree malnutrition.

No Money for Food

“I cannot even afford to feed my boy and girl now,” the mother said.

Negros, an island 260 miles south of Manila, attracted international concern after world sugar prices collapsed in 1984. The Tiangaos, along with about 500,000 other tenant farmers, cane-cutters and sugar-mill workers, were thrown out of work. Soon the children of these people were going hungry, and within months there were pictures in the world press of dying children, little more than skeletons.

Relief agencies around the world began funneling food and money to Negros. The European Communities donated $15 million. The U.N. Children’s Fund began an intensive feeding program. The U.S. Agency for International Development delivered tons of powdered milk. The Roman Catholic Church sponsors a program that feeds 50,000 children.

Medical people and political leaders told a visiting reporter that there has been an improvement in the situation, at least statistically. The number of malnutrition-related deaths was down last year, from 648 the year before.

The year-old government of President Corazon Aquino says it is attempting to confront the problem head-on. She says she recognizes the extent of the crisis, and she has permitted extensive foreign assistance on the central Philippine island.

Specter of Continued Starvation

But many of the people fear that the aid is beginning to run out and that they will be haunted by the specter of continued starvation until the Aquino government addresses the fundamental cause.

“No matter what you do, there will always be malnourished children unless you give the land to the farmers who are tilling the land,” Msgr. Antonio Fortich told the reporter.

Fortich, the Roman Catholic bishop here, is an outspoken advocate of land reform and human rights, and he concedes that he has been accused by local military commanders of being a Communist. But he has not been silenced.

“The clamor for land reform is irreversible,” he said.

To religious leaders like Fortich, the island’s ancient, tenant-landlord relationship, combined with a law enacted under former President Ferdinand E. Marcos that fixes the minimum wage at $1.50 a day, has reduced the peasants’ buying power and, as a result, reduced their food intake as well.

“Mothers cannot even affordnow to buy a small can of milk for their babies,” Fortich said. “First we must increase the minimum wage by at least 50 cents a day, and then we must give the land to the tillers of the land, so they can control their future incomes.”

Like many regions of the Philippines, Negros has had a largely feudal system of land ownership for centuries. A handful of powerful landowners, the hacienderos, have employed the island’s peasants to work their lands, and they have given the farmers only a tiny portion of the proceeds. Through the generations, the tenant families have become beholden to the landlords.

In recent years, though, Communist insurgents of the New People’s Army have seized on land reform and the “liberation” of the peasant as their cause. The insurgency has spread and the insurgents have multiplied, to the point where their number is now estimated at more than 23,000.

“These people are not stupid,” Msgr. Fortich said of the insurgency’s ideological leaders. “They are using their group up there in the hills to pressure the government into instituting real land reform.”

In a proclamation March 3, President Aquino conceded the importance of land-reform, which she said was long overdue. And she announced a plan to finance a nationwide land distribution program to be financed through the sale of $1 billion worth of bankrupt corporations foreclosed on by the government.

Still Working on Program

It is not clear, though, whether anyone is interested in buying these firms, and Aquino said the Cabinet is still working on a comprehensive land reform program.

“We are just biding time,” Fortich said, echoing the words of other critics, who have charged that the president’s land reform proclamation was no more than a “cosmetic” gesture.

The governor of the island’s hardest-hit province, Negros Occidental, has proposed an ambitious but voluntary land reform program of his own. It asks the hacienderos to diversify their crops, to devote 30% of their lands to crops other than sugar and to turn over to their tenants the deed to 10% of their lands.

The governor, appointed by Aquino and himself a haciendero, has begun carrying out this so-called 60-30-10 plan on his own hacienda, but few others have followed suit.

According to Fortich, the Communist leaders do not regard the plan as “real land reform.”

‘60-30-10 Will Not Work’

“It might be possible,” he said, “if 40% went to the tillers of the land, but this 60-30-10 will not work.”

Meanwhile, relief workers and medical personnel have in recent weeks expressed concern that even the short-term, stop-gap solutions to Negros’ hunger problem are beginning to fail.

According to several aid workers, a highly nutritious cereal called “supersnack,” which the U.N. agency has been supplying for more than a year, is no longer being delivered. They say there has been no supersnack at emergency feeding centers since mid-December, and that they have been giving something called Corn Curls to the children.

Not long ago a CBS-TV crew was directed by the provincial government to a feeding center that was said to be serving supersnack, but the children there said this was the first time in two months that it had been given to them, and that it had been for the benefit of the camera.

In any case, according to Fortich, emergency relief is not the solution.

“There really is only one solution,” he said. “Repair the economy, and the nation will heal itself.”