Fewer hungry in Philippines under Aquino

Millions of extremely poor Filipinos are enjoying eating more food, with hunger rates dropping to their lowest levels in four years, according to a national survey released Friday. A spokesman for President Benigno Aquino, who marked 12 months in office this week, said the data released by Social Weather Stations could be a sign that his government's efforts to fight poverty were starting to have an impact. The Manila-based Social Weather Stations said 15.1 percent of respondents in June reported suffering hunger, defined as not having enough to eat several times in a month, compared with 20.5 percent in April. Projecting the figures on a nationwide scale, the polling firm said three million families were still going hungry, but this was down from 4.1 million families and the best figure since 2007. Aquino's spokesman Ricky Carandang, welcomed the data although he said the the government did not take full credit. "I'm not necessarily saying it is because we did it, but we have been committed to reducing poverty, and reducing poverty will have an effect on reducing hunger," Carandang told AFP. One in four Filipinos live on a dollar a day or less, according to a government survey in 2009.