DSWD: Food stamp pilot-testing could start July, cover 3,000 families

The Department of Social Welfare and Development said it will begin pilot-testing its food stamp program as early as next month or in August at the latest, with the first 3,000 beneficiary families identified from three impoverished sites.

“By July or August, we are going to do a pilot that is fully funded by the Asian Development Bank – $3 million to identify three sites with 3,000 families as pilot beneficiaries,” DSWD Sec. Rex Gatchalian said in an interview with CNN Philippines.

The food stamp program, also known as the “Walang Gutom 2027,” will provide electronic benefit transfers that will be loaded with food credits amounting to P3,000.

The food credit can be used to purchase a select list of food commodities from DSWD-accredited local retailers.

It intends to target the bottom one million households who belong to the food-poor criteria as defined by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) and who earn P8,000 or less per month.

Gatchalian said the pilot implementation will run for six months and will be gradually expanded to reach the targeted one million families.

“By the early part of next year, we will do 300,000, and then another 300,000 until we reach the 1-million mark,” the DSWD chief said.

He said the DSWD and the PSA will continuously vet the list of beneficiaries.

A clear exit mechanism has been set for the beneficiaries, who can only stay for as long as four years in the program.

The DSWD earlier said it will require beneficiaries to be actively looking for work or undergoing skills training through TESDA for future employment.

Setting this condition for the targeted 1 million beneficiaries of the food stamp program would help beneficiaries “graduate” from being poor, the DSWD said.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. earlier tasked the DSWD to include single parents, pregnant women, and lactating mothers among the beneficiaries of the program to address the problem of malnourished and stunted children born in the country.

Based on figures from the Food and Nutrition Research Institute, stunting rates for ages 0 to 23 months old is 21.6 percent or one in five children while for children under five years old, the stunting rate is 28.7 percent.

For a malnutrition rate for children in daycare facilities, Health Secretary Ted Herbosa earlier said it is pegged at 20 percent.

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