Democratizing Poverty Discourse: The Case of the SWS Self-Rated Surveys on Poverty and Hunger

There is a need to challenge official poverty discourse. For one, official poverty estimation in the Philippines is based on arbitrary assumptions that keep the poverty threshold low, thereby reducing poverty incidence. In a country of high inequality and where incomes of a large swathe of the population remain generally near each other, the placement of a poverty line underscores its arbitrary nature. There are two alternatives to this: replace the poverty line with a poverty zone to make the notion of poor more inclusive, or do away with the poverty line altogether. By providing ‘alternative statistics’, the Social Weather Stations self-rated poverty and hunger surveys challenge and help democratize the poverty discourse in the country. However, self-rated hunger seems to be the more reliable measure of poverty. Finally, poverty data, as it enters the public domain, becomes a setting for contestation as both government and SWS poverty and hunger data are used and woven into the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourse.