Hour by hour, minute by minute, the Filipino people is battling with hunger. In the city, animal scraps do not differ anymore from pagpag or leftover food eaten by the urban poor. Meanwhile, in the countryside, those who themselves produce food for the society are driven further from the fruits of their own labor. Every day that they fight against starvation, they scrounge for means to continue living.

When the pandemic struck the country, abject hunger and food insecurity arose among ordinary Filipinos. By 2020, three out of five Filipino families said that they suffer from food inadequacy. Meanwhile, more than two million households experience extreme hunger. This is the dire problem of starvation amongst the Filipino nation that has long been left unresolved by the burdensome and anti-poor state.

Under Marcos II, there has been no concrete and substantial step to begin changing these conditions. Instead of unburdening the masses, Marcos II chose to impose additional taxes upon them. Instead of genuine agrarian reform, the inept regime offered loans. They slashed the budget for ayuda and worsened the disenfranchised’s plight. All of these while he, his cronies and his masters gluts on the people’s blood and sweat.

The puppet regime will never deliver a solution. All actions and policies undertaken by the state under this semicolonial and semifeudal society will only be for the satisfaction of the imperialists, foreign businessmen and the most powerful local ruling classes. As long as this system remains rotten, there will be someone who dies of hunger and poverty. Genuine food security and sovereignty have no place in a society leeched on by landowners, bureaucrat capitalists and big bourgeois compradors ensconced in power.

There is only one true way to end this cycle: the People’s War! As the societal crisis intensifies, it becomes all the more just to overhaul the system and join the people’s democratic revolution. With the world’s commemoration of the World Food Day, every Filipino must hold onto the justness and correctness of advancing the people’s democratic war. Only by creating a new society that shall truly serve the nation can the people be completely free from extreme poverty and starvation.