Just before midnight

“It gets late early out there,” baseball star Yogi Berra once snorted. Late into his last term, Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmena vowed that he'd help ill-fed kids and anemic breast-feeding mothers “out there”.

In mountain and slum barangays, a new survey confirms that malnutrition savaged lives, he said. Ten most affected barangays were in “a state of calamity.” It's a quarter of midnight. Sure. Still, one still do something.

So, the mayor adopted a plan where a volunteer tracks 10 affected residents whose diets would be fortified. Drawn up by Nutrition Center of the Philippines ' Florentino Solon, the plan will tap up to 10,000 volunteers. “I must give attention to malnutrition,” Osmena stressed.

“How did it get so late so soon?” asked the cartoon's “Dr Seuss.” Although tardy, Osmena is right to heed the silent scream of hunger's victims. Listless from short rations, these mothers and kids can only whimper, as did Lazarus at the rich man's gate.

Osmena recasting of priorities raised few eyebrows. Cebu is deafened by furious protests, against traffic snarls from flyover construction. Flyovers are hasty band-aid measures, Cebu Business Club wrote to the President. Cebu didn't craft a masterplan even as it mushroomed into a metropolis.

“(There's) lack of proper coordination”, City Hall's website admits “Planning on metropolitan level, with the creation of a metro authority, would be a future necessity.” That future is here for a city whose wells are drying up. It also didn't plan for a basic resource like water and, until now, nutrition.

Was this obsolete policy framework inevitable? Osmena brooks no dissent. He imposes whim for plans, and bickers endlessly with next door mayors and governor. In that vacuum, the vulnerable get short shrift.

City officials stonewalled a slew of studies that documented chronic hunger's rampage. Universities of North Carolina and San Carlos , reported earlier that malnutrition stunted 28 out of every 100 Cebuano kids. By age eight, classmates tower over them by 11 centimeters.

The 5th National Nutrition Survey found that 34 out of every 100 kids, up to age 5, were under-weight. Lack of Vitamin A made them vulnerable to blindness. These stripped them of resistance to disease.

“Protein energy malnutrition sends more pre-school children to premature graves than in even poorer countries like Bangladesh, India or Pakistan,” World and Asian Development Bank said in their joint report: “Early Childhood Development” Indeed, “the most violated human right is the right of the child to celebrate his first birthday,” stressed Cebu Daily News

Lack of micro-nutrients also sap intelligence quotients. IQs of ill-fed kids can be whittled down “from 10 to 14 percent”, the Asian Development Bank warned. The loss is irreversible. “Their elevators will never go to the top floor”. That's layman lingo for permanently impaired lives.

The 6th National Survey, in mid-2005, decried the slow progress in closing the nutrition gap. Malnutrition spawns a tragic cycle: Ill-fed mothers give birth to shriveled children. They will mother, in turn, the next generation of dwarfed infants.

Were Cebu officials blinkered by a vision so narrow, they saw no farther than half a lifetime in each direction? Look at the record.

Osmena and a rubber-stamp council, in that period, fiddled, with vigilante summary executions, buying handguns for barangay chieftains, fudging yen loans, etc. They didn't grasp implications of data flowing in from an inter-generational study of 3,327 Cebuana mothers and their 3,080 kids, by Universities of San Carlos and North Carolina

Not so with global agencies. The bank's “first health financing strategy was based in large part on research conducted in Cebu City ,” wrote economist Barry Popkin. This longitudinal study shaped Unicef policy on breast-milk substitutes and Asian Development Bank programs on early child development.

In 2005, that study anchored analysis by Harvard University scientists for the $13-billion Global Alliance for Vacines and Immunization program, the Economist reported. Today, it's tracking changing Filipino disease patterns from altered diets.

“Incredible but parochial Cebu officials coasted along, blissfully unaware of this valuable asset under their noses over the years,” a Sun Star editorial marveled. "No one asked questions. The blind see no difference between pebbles and diamonds.”

Councilors belatedly allocated P3.1 million for supplemental feeding programs – peanuts compared to the P132 million spent for a new legislative building. And delay, warned the leading medical journal “Lancet” last week, guts the effectiveness of efforts to cap malnutrition.

“The first two years of life are the window of opportunity when nutrition programs have an enormous impact on a child's development, with life-long benefits,” said an International Food Policy Research Institute study, published in Lancet. “Boys who received (nutrition) supplement, in the first two years of life, earned on average 46 percent higher wages as adults”. After age three, economic benefits, as adults, dwindled to zero.

Policy failure, by omission, led to premature deaths of many. It sentenced thousands to twilight lives. How will Cebu officials account for that? Just before midnight, Osmena pledges: city hall will no longer be deaf to the sighs of orphans or drink the tears of children.*

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