Poorest Filipinos Only Survive on Eating "Pagpag" or Leftover Foods from Garbage and Dumps, Report says

A report from India Today stated that a lot of Filipinos in the lower class suffering from poverty only survived from leftover foods or pagpag from garbage and dumps.

Pagpag is a Filipino term for leftover foods that were collected from garbage and dumps, washed, cooked, and sold for about $0.59 - $0.39 to poor people of the community in Manila, Philippines.

In English translation it means as "dusted off, or recycled.

According to Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) reported that out of approximately 105 million of the Philippines population in 2018, 24.76% of it lived below the poverty line.

Some restaurants in Tondo, Manila hired collectors of pagpag in Jollibee's and KFC's dump areas for their so-called Filipino traditional cooking like à la kaldereta or adobo, packed the cooked pagpag, and sold it.

As per the research by Bordon Project, 6.5 percent of Metro Manila's population lives below the poverty line showing this state of extreme hunger of many Filipino.

Meanwhile, the National Anti-Poverty Commission had warned the people of the danger on eating pagpag as it could lead to various diseases and risks such as Hepatitis A, typhoid, diarrhoea, and cholera.


However, the people claimed that no one has ever died of eating pagpag so there's nothing to worry about.

And they also said that it is better to eat pagpag with a low price than nothing at all.

"With the kind of life we live, this helps a lot. When you buy a bag worth a few pesos, you can already feed one whole family," A slum resident said.

Moreover, the government has started to address the issue and developed policies that would prevent the use of pagpag as meal after the report of CNN on 2012 that caught the attention of the world on how extreme the problem in hunger in the Philippines is.

Photo courtesy: Sydney Snoeck