This story
was taken from Bulatlat, the Philippines's alternative weekly
newsmagazine (www.bulatlat.com, www.bulatlat.net, www.bulatlat.org).
Vol. V, No. 37, October 23-29, 2005
‘Palit-Bigas’
Prostitution
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 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 © 2005 Bulatlat
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Or how rural women are trading sex for
rice due to hunger
Bulatlat