Bansot is a Tagalog word that means stunted, often used to describe a person, animal or plant whose growth or development has been arrested. It can refer to being physically short, but it can also imply mental or psychological growth has stopped.
Can a country be considered economically bansot? A country we are familiar with is probably a good example. It stopped growing as fast as it should have due to wrong policies and overwhelming corruption. Its neighbors overtook it and it doesn’t look like it is doing much to reverse the trend.
Before this country can stop being the regional bansot, it must save its next generations from the curse of being bansot. It must pour the resources needed to provide mothers the prenatal care they need and thereafter, to make sure their children get the nutrition required for normal physical growth and mental development.
The Foundation for Economic Freedom (FEF) held a lecture last week with the theme: ‘Bata, bayan, bukas: Reducing childhood malnutrition and stunting through economic freedom.’ The lecture highlighted the urgent need to treat nutrition not merely as a health and nutrition issue, but as an agricultural and economic policy challenge.
It is an agricultural and economic policy issue because our policies have kept food expensive, a reason why there’s a lot of malnutrition.
Low-income families spend about 60 percent of their meager income on food, half of that on rice because rice is cheap and filling. Households that can’t afford more diverse foods often have diets low in protein, vitamins, minerals.
The lecture opened with FEF’s award-winning short documentary on stunting, malnutrition and agricultural policy, which recently won the Atlas Network’s Public Policy Impact Award in New York.
The film underscored how child undernutrition and agricultural inefficiencies are intertwined challenges requiring urgent national action. ‘Malnutrition is not only a public health issue – it is an economic freedom issue,’ said FEF president Calixto Chikiamco in his opening remarks.
Child malnutrition is every Filipino’s concern. There is substantial scientific evidence showing that inadequate nutrition in early childhood (especially before age five) can compromise both physical and intellectual (cognitive) development.
Children who are malnourished (or stunted – meaning chronic undernutrition leading to low height-for-age) often score lower on measures of cognition (IQ, attention, memory, language skills).
The problem is huge. One in four Filipino children under five is stunted. That irreversibly limits physical growth, brain development and lifetime earning potential. That’s a tragedy.
DepEd Secretary Sonny Angara told me that he wants to be involved in child feeding programs now under DSWD. Sec. Sonny said that unless the feeding programs are done right, by the time the children are in elementary school, it becomes more difficult for the school system to make them learn the basics of math, reading and science.
The World Bank declared that the Philippines’ learning poverty rate is at an alarming 91 percent. This means nine out of ten 10-year-olds cannot read and understand a simple text.
The World Bank warned that ‘If this situation is not addressed, the country risks having a less skilled workforce in the future.’ And that’s putting it kindly.
The FEF estimated that undernutrition costs the Philippines $8.5 billion (P496 billion) annually – around two to three percent of GDP – through lost productivity, higher health care costs and diminished human capital.
In her presentation, Atty. Benedicta ‘Dick’ Du-Baladad, a Fellow of the FEF, reframed nutrition as a strategic business investment.
Numerous Filipino children, she said, are ‘born with promise’ but whose potential is ‘diminished before their second birthday. [This] is a lifelong economic penalty,’ she said.
According to Du-Baladad, uncurbed malnutrition ‘directly undermines economic freedom’ by limiting individual capacity, fostering people’s dependency on social safety nets and distorting the labor market.
Du-Baladad urged the private sector to integrate nutrition into business strategies, workforce development and food system reforms, warning that failure to act risks reversing hard-won gains in malnutrition reduction.
Here’s a thought: for a start, can the highly profitable manufacturers of cup noodles infuse their products with nutrients? Can we have a rice variety with vitamins?
Indeed, the difficulty that our business sector is having in hiring qualified staff is traceable to our failure to provide proper nutrition to our children. Stunted development as it affects the brain means the current generation of potential workers will be difficult to educate, train and make economically productive.
We are missing the train again. We are not likely to benefit from a demographic dividend which we should be enjoying because we have a large working-age population. Malnutrition and stunting among children under five significantly undercut the potential upside.
This is such a pity because more people in the productive age range (roughly15-64) means more potential workers, which can support faster economic growth, especially if the ratio of dependents (young and old) is lower.
A larger labor pool can mean more specialization, greater innovation, higher aggregate output and more capacity to invest in infrastructure, education, health etc.
If education, health, skills training and jobs are available, the large working population can boost consumption, tax revenues and economic dynamism.
Instead of a demographic dividend, we will have the burden of a large unemployable working age population requiring hand-outs or ayuda from the government. This may be a source of political strength for our political dynasties, but bad for the nation.
Dr. Mildred Guirindola of the DOST-Food and Nutrition Research Institute (DOST-FNRI) in her lecture before the FEF said ‘Malnutrition, particularly stunting, is not only a health issue but also a barrier to human capital, productivity and national progress.’
Guirindola pointed out that stunted children are more likely to drop out of school, earn less as adults and face lifelong health risks, with their economic productivity as adults clipped by more than 10 percent in their lifetime.
‘Reducing stunting is not just saving lives. It is securing our nation’s future,’ Guirindola added.