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MANILA: Daniel Auminto lost his job and then his home when the coronavirus pandemic sent the Philippines to shutdown. Now he and his family live on the streets and depend on food donations to survive.
Charities are struggling to meet the growing demand for food as millions of families go hungry across the country.
COVID-19 restrictions have crippled the economy and left many without work.
“I’ve never seen hunger at this level before,” said Jomar Fleras, executive director of Rise Against Hunger in the Philippines, which works with more than 40 partners to feed the poor.
“If you go out, everyone will tell you that they are more afraid of starving than dying of COVID. They don’t care about COVID anymore.”
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The number of hungry people has reached a record high during the pandemic, according to pollster Social Weather Stations.
Nearly a third of families, or 7.6 million households, did not have enough food to eat at least once in the previous three months, their September survey showed.
Among them, 2.2 million families experience “severe hunger”, the highest in history.
The numbers have been on the rise since May, two months after the country entered a severe lockdown, reversing a downward trend since 2012.
Virus restrictions have been relaxed in recent months to allow more companies to operate as the government seeks to revive the devastated economy, which is expected to shrink as much as 9.5 percent this year.
For the country’s legions of poor, the pandemic is just another challenge in their lives, and not even the most serious.
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Auminto, 41, spent years sleeping on the streets and earning a living selling trash for recycling. His luck changed in 2019 when he found a steady job as a building painter.
That gave him enough money to rent a room in Manila, which he shared with his wife and two-year-old daughter, buy food and even save a little for his dream of opening a small shop.
Then COVID-19 hit.
“We lost our house, my job. We even lost the clothes that were stolen from us,” Auminto said as he sat in a park where the family sleeps in a crushed cardboard box at night.
Daniel Auminto lost his job as a building painter due to the pandemic, which meant he also lost his home; he now lives on the streets with his wife and two-year-old son. (Photo: AFP / Ted ALJIBE)
Before the pandemic, “I planned to work and work my way out of poverty,” he said. “It is for my family, so that I can give them a better life, send my son to school.”
Every day they join long lines of mostly homeless people for a free meal at an outdoor food pantry.
Some days, the family receives two meals from different pantries; other days it’s just one. Sometimes they don’t have any food.
“LIVE LIKE PIGS”
Five days a week, volunteers at a center in Manila run by the Roman Catholic Society of the Divine Word prepare about 1,000 meals of chicken, vegetables and rice that are packed in boxes and delivered to the hungry.
Demand is steadily increasing, said Father Flavie Villanueva, who runs the program.
“We started doing this in April and we started with 250 (people queuing). It increased to 400, and then 600, then 800. Three weeks ago it was 1,000,” Villanueva said.
“Most are still homeless, but there are a good number who are homeless but desperate because there is no work.”
Millions of families in the Philippines are starving and charities are struggling to meet the growing demand for food. (Photo: AFP / Ted ALJIBE)
Hunger was already a major problem in the Philippines before the pandemic hit.
About 59 million people suffered from “moderate or severe food insecurity” between 2017 and 2019, the highest in Southeast Asia, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations said in a report.
The virus’s impact on hunger has been compounded by a series of typhoons that have hit the country in recent months, destroying tens of thousands of homes.
Fleras said food donations have skyrocketed during the pandemic, in part because many factories forced to suspend operations turned over their surpluses. But it is not enough to meet the demand.
“We could reach 200,000 families this year,” he said.
Auminto said it was “painful” to have lost everything and to be back on the street where he says the police treat them “like animals.”
“They must understand our situation, not treat us like pigs,” he said.
“We are already living like pigs.”
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