Ako Bicol party-list Rep. Raul Angelo Bongalon challenged officials from the National Economic Development Authority (NEDA) to try and live on a P100 daily budget and see if they will survive.
Bongalon said he even raised that budget because the P63 a day as reportedly set by NEDA to cover for three meals the whole day is “not enough.”
But even P100 a day is not sufficient since “for me, what is realistic is at least P70 for breakfast, P100 for lunch and P100 for dinner, so P270—and that’s just for food under tight budgeting,” the lawmaker said in Tagalog.
Bongalon is asking NEDA officials to review their numbers before making a statement
and validate if it suits the actual situation of the society.
The Bicolano politician was referring to recent accounts, saying that a family who spends P21 per meal cannot be considered food poor based on the 2023 Full Year Official Poverty Statistics Report of NEDA.
This inevitably received widespread public backlash among Filipinos, including government officials that questioned the numbers.
In a statement, NEDA Secretary Arsenio Balisacan explained that setting thresholds “serve as part of a broader set of tools used to assess the country’s development progress and to measure the effectiveness of the government’s policies and programs in addressing poverty.”
“They are not, and were never intended to be, prescribed budgets for a decent standard of living. They do not dictate how much a family should spend on food, nor do they provide an idea of a desirable household budget,” Balisacan said.
