Poe: Campaign vs. malnutrition, child stunting must continue

PHILIPPINES, April 21 - Press Release
April 21, 2025

Poe: Campaign vs. malnutrition, child stunting must continue

Sen. Grace Poe exhorted candidates in the upcoming May 2025 elections to make child-related issues such as malnutrition a priority.

Poe said the passage of Republic Act (RA) No. 11037 or "Masustansyang Pagkain Para sa Batang Pilipino Act" that she authored paved the way for feeding programs to help fight the scourge of hunger and malnutrition among children.

"We're not starting from zero. The programs and the budget for child nutrition are in place, but we need champions for this advocacy to ensure its continuity," the chairperson of the Senate Committee on Finance said.

"We hope we elect officials who believe that the economic future of our country hinges on our children," she added.

With the enactment of RA 11037 came the institutionalization of the School-Based Feeding Program (SBFP) and Supplementary Feeding Program (SFP).

Supervised by the Department of Education, SBFP aims to address undernutrition among learners by providing hot meals or nutritional food products as well as fresh milk to wasted and severely wasted learners from Kindergarten to Grade 6.

From School Year 2018-2019 to 2023-2024, SBFP facilitated the distribution of hot meals and nutritional food products to 16,088,184 learners and milk to 12,139,770 learners.

For the ongoing School Year 2024-2025, the program is currently providing 2,207,769 learners with hot meals and nutritional food products and 2,206,268 learners with fresh milk.

Under the 2025 national budget, which Poe sponsored in the Senate, the SBFP budget amounted to P11.7 billion, which is P65.7 million higher than the 2024 budget.

Poe introduced a special provision in the SBFP budget under the 2024 and 2025 General Appropriations Acts to minimize administrative costs and to ensure that most of the allocated funds will be used for the feeding program itself.

For the SFP, which is under the Department of Social Welfare and Development, a total of 9,558,636 children in local government unit-run Child Development Centers and Supervised Neighborhood Play were provided nutritious food and fresh milk from 2020-2024.

For School Year 2023-2024 alone, the SFP served 1,846,902 children. The number of severely underweight and underweight children was reduced from 170,135 to 42,447 equivalent to a 75% improvement rate.

Poe said the figures about the kids' improved nutrition are encouraging, but added there should be no let-up in the programs.

"We are gratified that in our years in the Senate, we are able to pass the feeding program laws, and correspondingly created a budget space for their implementation," Poe said.

"Where our children's nutrition is concerned, a diet policy does not work. For our children to reach their full potential and be productive, we need to provide them with the very basic need, which is food," Poe added.