‘Family planning to mitigate effects of inflation’

ZAMBOANGA CITY – Filipinos should practice family planning as increasing family size will make them more vulnerable to poverty due to inflation, the Commission on Population (Popcom) said.

“The size of the family really affects the basic needs if the prices continue to rise up,” Popcom deputy executive director Lolito Tocardon said on the sidelines of the Regional Population Management Congress held Wednesday in this city.

Based on the July 2018 study of the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), about half of the average Filipino family’s monthly income is spent on food.

The PSA reported that at the end of the second quarter of 2018, food expenditure stood at 41.5 percent of total household expenditure compared with Western countries like the United States and United Kingdom, which spend around 10 percent of their monthly expenditure on food.

The PSA also found that more than half of the members of Filipino families are dependents with overall dependency ratio of 57.7 percent. 

The PSA said families with highest poverty incidence, like those in the fishing and agriculture sectors, are hardest hit as high inflation remains unabated, making the daily survival of poor families hard to address, more so with increasing family size.

Tocardon noted that a minimum wage earner would be spending most of his income on food and could hardly meet other basic necessities.

“Having a big family will be vulnerable to poverty because their needs also increase while their income cannot answer their needs,” Tocardon said.

“If prices continue to rise, the capacity of providing basic needs is also reduced and the vulnerability also increased,” he added. – With Mayen Jaymalin