‘Palit-Bigas’
Prostitution
Or how rural
women are trading sex for rice due to hunger
The Philippines observed
World Food Day this year amid an atmosphere of increasing hunger. Amid
worsening hunger, a number of women in the rural areas – where food crops
are grown – have been turning to what is called palit-bigas
prostitution.
BY ALEXANDER MARTIN
REMOLLINO
Bulatlat
|
AGAINST HUNGER:
The Oct. 21 march by thousands of activists in observance of World
Peasant Day was as much about hunger - which is driving thousands of
rural women to prostitution - as it was about landlessness,
globalization, and ousting President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
PHOTOS BY
AUBREY MAKILAN |
More and more
Filipino rural women are driven to prostitution due to hunger.
This stark reality
has come about as the Philippines joined other nations on Oct. 16 to
observe the 25th World Food Day and as thousands of farmers
from provinces south and north of Manila marched several kilometers last
week to Metro Manila for a big protest rally near the gates of the
presidential palace.
A national federation
of peasant women, Amihan, estimates the number of prostituted women in the
country at 800,000. This is 200,000 more than the 600,000 estimate given
by Gabriela, the national women’s alliance, last year. Both groups state
that many prostituted women come from the provinces.
The Gabriela Women’s
Party (GWP), represented in Congress by Liza Largoza-Maza, had warned even
last year of the rise of palit-bigas prostitution. The phenomenon
of palit-bigas (or selling bodies for rice) was first documented by
Gabriela following the 1992 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in Central Luzon,
said Maza. She also said that in some cases these sexual “favors” were
done in exchange for a cup of coffee.
How have Filipino
women been coping so far with increasing hunger? Are the cases of women
like Julie Ann and Gina indicators?
Julie Ann (not her
real name), 18, works as a “guest relations officer” (euphemism for
bargirl) in Nasugbu, Batangas, some three hours south of Manila. She hails
from a family of corn farmers in Quezon province.
Her family, Julie Ann
told Bulatlat, earns some P200 ($3.61) for every sack of corn sold.
While she could not recall how much they would earn after every corn
harvest season, she did say that it was never enough to feed all of them,
and she recalls several instances when they would have only one meal for a
whole day.
From her job as a
bargirl, Julie Ann says, she could earn as much as P1,500 ($27.05) just by
letting customers take her out for a night. “That’s certainly more than
half of what our family earns by selling sacks of corn,” she said.
Residents of nearby
Calatagan town, also in Batangas, interviewed by Bulatlat told of
women in a number of villages there resorting to palit-bigas
prostitution. In some cases, they said, the kilogram of rice which they
get for trading sex would come with a few cans of sardines.
Julie Ann’s case is
similar to that of Gina, 26, who comes from a family of rice farmers in
Montalban, Rizal (about an hour north of Manila). She appeared in a recent
press conference sponsored by Amihan.
Gina recently went
back to the job she left seven years ago, that of a dancer at a nightclub
in Caloocan City, so she could buy medicines for a daughter sick of
urinary tract infection.
From that job she
earned some P700 ($12.62), a far cry from the five kilograms of rice for
each week that she earns in Montalban’s upland rice farms, and the
additional two kilograms she gets from hiring herself out as a
laundrywoman. She also chops wood for charcoal and gets some P15 ($0.27)
for every 100 pieces of chopped wood. Most of the time her family has only
one meal a day, she said.
Hunger where the food is
An October 2004 study
by Jose Ramon Albert and Paula Monina Collado of the government
Statistical Research and Training Center (SRTC) noted that seven out of
every 10 poor Filipinos live in the countryside. Data from the
socio-economic think tank IBON Foundation for the same year place the
number of poor Filipinos at 88 percent of the then 81-million population,
which is reported to have grown to 84 million.
It is disturbing that
women in the rural areas, where food crops are planted and grown, are
increasingly turning to prostitution to cope with hunger. Based on the
October 2004 SRTC study, seven out of ten poor Filipinos come from the
rural areas. The same study shows that half of all rural dwellers are
poor.
“The overwhelming
numerical importance of the rural poor means that poverty programs must be
concentrated in improving...(people’s) living standards in rural areas and
that we ought to promote policies on rural development, which include
support for rural entrepreneurial activities and rural competitiveness, as
well as enabling the improvement of farmers’ access to markets through
infrastructure development and the creation of farmers’ markets in the
cities (to ensure that less middle men reap the fruits of farmers’ labors),”
Albert and Collado said in their study.
Based on 2004 data
from Amihan, 68 percent of people in rural areas are poor.
The high and
increasing incidence of poverty in the countryside is blamed by peasant
groups on landlessness and globalization.
Amihan reveals that
eight out of ten farmers in the Philippines are landless. More than 13
million hectares of agricultural land in the Philippines, Amihan further
discloses, is controlled by big landlords and comprador businessmen, while
multinational corporations also control vast tracts of land.
State of hunger
The Philippines
observed World Food Day this year amid an atmosphere of increasing hunger.
Last month, the
results of the Social Weather Stations’ Social Survey for the third
quarter of 2005 showed 15.5 percent of household heads reporting that
their families experienced hunger, without having anything to eat at least
once during the said period. This is equivalent to some 2.6 million
families or nearly 16 million individuals experiencing hunger in this
year’s third quarter.
The hunger percentage
for this year’s third quarter is higher than that registered for the same
period last year, which stood at 15.1 percent. The SWS reports that this
is also the highest national hunger percentage since March 2001.
The results of the
SWS surveys on hunger from 1998 to the third quarter of 2005 also show
that hunger incidences for the third quarter of every year since then have
always been the lowest compared to other parts of the year – until 2004,
when it recorded a 15.1-percent hunger incidence for the year’s third
quarter, as compared to 7.4 percent for the first quarter, 13 percent for
the second quarter, and 11.5 percent for the last quarter.
It was in the third
quarter of 2004 that President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo admitted that the
country was mired in a fiscal crisis.
For this year, the
SWS reported a hunger incidence of 13 percent for the first quarter and 12
percent for the second quarter. Bulatlat
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