Feeding hope in a hungry nation

By Noel Galon de Leon

Every July, brightly colored banners hang across public schools and barangay halls, announcing Nutrition Month. Children chant rhymes about vegetables. Parents are urged to feed their kids with “go, grow, and glow” foods. Government officials deliver speeches about health and well-being. And this 2025, the celebration continues with its hopeful slogans and staged feeding programs. But behind the pageantry and posters, a harsher truth persists, millions of Filipino children are still hungry, and too many of them are found right here in Western Visayas, in Iloilo, in our own backyards.

According to the Philippine Statistics Authority, poverty incidence dropped to 15.5% nationally by the end of 2023. On paper, it looks like a triumph. But a more human picture is painted by the Social Weather Stations (SWS), in March 2025, over 52% of Filipino families still felt poor, and the percentage was even higher in the Visayas at 62%. How can we celebrate Nutrition Month when over 35% of Filipinos say they’ve experienced hunger, unable to feed themselves or their children?

Let’s talk about the children, the very focus of these celebrations. Recent studies show that among Filipino children aged 0–5 years, 30.3% are stunted, 20% are underweight, and nearly 8% are wasted. These are not just statistics. These are real children, small for their age, weak, often sick, and frequently absent from school. In rural areas, especially among fishing communities and the urban poor of Iloilo City, those figures climb even higher. In households where the sea is the only provider, stunting rises to 37.7% among toddlers, and underweight rates hover around 26.4%.

We know these children. They are in our neighborhoods, in public school classrooms with torn uniforms and empty lunchboxes. Some come to school having had nothing but coffee or rice soaked in water. We see them every day, and yet the nation speaks of “nutrition” as if a slogan could substitute a meal.

What does Nutrition Month really mean in a country where children are told to eat healthy but their families can’t afford milk, vegetables, or even rice? Where government campaigns emphasize “balanced diets” while people wait in long lines for subsidized food? Where billions are spent on infrastructure, yet so little reaches the plates of the poor?

In Iloilo, we are proud of our heritage, our resilience, our community. But pride cannot replace protein. Resilience cannot repair the long-term damage of chronic malnutrition. Studies on dietary intake among Filipino school children show severe micronutrient deficiencies: 92–94% lack calcium, up to 90% lack iron, and vitamin A, C, and folate are dangerously low. These are the invisible deficiencies that do not always show in photographs, but they slow brain development, weaken immunity, and steal futures.

This month, we celebrate Nutrition Month under the theme of “Healthy Diet, Gawing Affordable for All,” a noble goal, no doubt. But who will make it affordable? When a family of five survives on ₱200 a day, even a piece of chicken is a luxury. And yet, it is these families that are often scolded for not feeding their children “nutritious” meals. It’s a cruel irony that the burden of healthy eating falls on those who cannot afford even enough.

We cannot talk about nutrition without talking about poverty, policy, and priorities. The government’s goal of reducing poverty to 9% by 2028 is ambitious, but what about now? What about the children whose growth will be permanently stunted by next year, whose brains will never reach their full potential because of what they didn’t eat today?

Nutrition Month should not just be a celebration, it should be a call to action. Not just feeding programs for a day, but sustainable, community-led solutions. Not just slogans, but subsidies. Not just poster contests, but real policy shifts toward affordable food, living wages, accessible healthcare, and maternal education. It should mean listening to barangay health workers, empowering mothers, and rethinking the way we allocate national budgets. It should mean redefining nutrition not just as food, but as a right.

In Western Visayas, we know hunger intimately, but we also know how to organize, to care, and to demand. As we hang those Nutrition Month tarpaulins again this year, let us not forget the children they are meant to represent. Let us not decorate the walls while ignoring empty stomachs.

Because the truth is, until every child in Iloilo, in the Visayas, and across the nation has enough to eat—not just for today but for life, Nutrition Month will remain a performance.

And our children deserve more than that. They deserve meals. They deserve health. They deserve a future.

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Noel Galon de Leon is a writer and educator at University of the Philippines Visayas, where he teaches in both the Division of Professional Education and U.P. High School in Iloilo. He serves as an Executive Council Member of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts-National Committee on Literary Arts.