A June survey by Social Weather Stations, a private nonprofit polling institute, found that 20.3 percent of Filipino families had experienced involuntary hunger in the previous three months. That is down from 23.2 percent in March.
SWS counts a family as hungry if it had nothing to eat at least once in the past three months. Most tecorded cases, 15.8 percent, were “moderate”, meaning it happened only once or a few times in a month. The other 4.5 percent were “severe”, meaning it happened often or always.
The findings are not broken down by province, so rates specifically for Catanduanes Province are not available.
The SWS findings nonetheless are borne out by the National Nutrition Survey, which is a Philippine official, nationwide, periodic survey. Its purpose is to measure the nutritional and health status of Filipinos to guide government policy on food, nutrition, and related social services.
The National Nutrition Survey is administered by the Food and Nutrition Research Institute under the Department of Science and Technology. It has been administered once every five years, with intermediate updates, since 1978. The last full survey was in 2023, although there have been smaller, intermediate surveys.
Poverty drives the gap
Among those who rate themselves as poor, 24.5 percent reported hunger, compared with 16.2 percent of non-poor families.
Mindanao had the highest rate of hunger of any region at 24 percent, according to SWS, but regional figures carry a margin of error of about six points, so the rankings often shift from one survey to the next.
Economists and aid groups point to low or irregular incomes as the main cause. Rising food prices make it worse, especially for rice, which dominates the Filipino diet.
By volume, the Philippines is currently the world’s largest rice-importing nation. The Philippines annually imports at about 4.9 million metric tons, ahead of Vietnam and China.
Disasters and wars such as the Middle East conflict add to the risk of hunger because they drive up prices.
A long, uneven recovery
Generally speaking, hunger fell steadily for most of the past decade, from 23.8 percent in 2012 to 9.3 percent in late 2019. The COVID-19 lockdowns reversed that progress, however, pushing hunger to a record 30.7 percent in September 2020. This affected an estimated 7.6 million families, and rates of hunger have stayed high ever since. SWS switched from surveying household heads to surveying adults in households in 2025, so comparisons with earlier years should be made with care.
Studies of childhood stunting reveal that child malnutrition has improved more slowly. About 23.6 percent of children under five were stunted in 2023, down from roughly 45 percent in 1989. Rural areas fared worse, at 25.8 percent. The government’s target is 17.9 percent by 2028.
How the nation compares
The 2025 Global Hunger Index, which combines undernourishment with child stunting, wasting and mortality, scored the Philippines at 13.4. That puts it at 66th place out of 123 countries, putting it in the “moderate” category. In Southeast Asia, the country trails Thailand but does better than Cambodia and Timor-Leste. Because the index and the SWS survey measure hunger differently, their figures cannot be compared directly.
The Global Hunger Index is jointly published by three organizations: the humanitarian NGO Concern Worldwide, the German aid agency Welthungerhilfe, and, since 2024, the academic Institute for International Law of Peace and Armed Conflict at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. The index has been published every October since 2006.
What the government is doing
The main program to alleviate hunger in the Philippines is called Walang Gutom, or “No Hunger”. It gives food-poor households P3,000 a month in food credits for up to 36 months, and the program has reached 600,000 households so far. The Department of Social Welfare and Development aims for 750,000 households by the end of 2026, against about 1.4 million households it considers food-poor.
Another program,, the longer-running 4Ps cash-transfer program, reaches 4.4 million households and includes rice subsidies.
Sources: SWS surveys; Global Hunger Index 2025; FNRI National Nutrition Survey 2023; FAO; DSWD.
Bryce McIntyre, PhD, resides in San Andres. He holds a doctoral degree from Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, USA.
Perplexity AI aided in the research for this article.