A graphic attributing a statement to President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. about the government food threshold supposedly pegged at P21 per meal for one family is making the rounds online. This is false.
The Presidential Communications Office sent a copy of the quote card posted by a Facebook page on Nov. 1 for verification. It bore a logo of the state-operated People’s Television Network and the alleged remark of Marcos:
“BASE SA AMING RESEARCH. SAPAT NA ANG 21 PESOS KADA MEAL NG ISANG PAMILYA. (Based on our research, P21 per meal is enough for a family.)”
VERA Files found other FB posts carrying such a claim in the succeeding days.
No official records or statements showed that Marcos uttered these words. Neither did the state-run broadcast network publish such a bogus graphic card.
Although the figure cited comes from 2023 statistical data based on the government’s poverty metrics, the FB posts mislead the public into believing that P21 per meal is sufficient to feed a Filipino family of five.
In 2024, Arsenio Balisacan, secretary of the Department of Economy, Planning, and Development, formerly the National Economic and Development Authority, said that the monthly threshold for food poverty as of 2023 was P9,581 for a family of five or P64 per person per day, equivalent to P21.33 per person per meal.
Food threshold, as defined by the Philippine Statistics Authority, is “the minimum income/expenditure required for a family/individual to meet the basic food needs, which satisfies the nutritional requirements for economically necessary and socially desirable physical activities.” Only spending below the amounts mentioned by Balisacan would be classified as “food-poor.”
Sonny Africa, executive director of development organization IBON Foundation, was quoted in an Aug. 15, 2025 GMA News Online report as calling for a “more realistic” food poverty threshold, suggesting it be at least P90 per person per day, based on its recalculation of the 2008 Family Living Wage Estimates adjusted for inflation and other factors affecting household expenses such as rent and transportation, among others.
Both DEPDev and PSA admitted the formula that arrived at the P64 food budget per day is “outdated” and “insufficient,” respectively, and previously expressed their intention to adjust it.
The fraudulent posts began circulating as the PSA’s 2025 poverty statistics, which showed the annual per-capita poverty threshold at P35,121 or P96.22 per person per day, drew public criticism, with IBON Foundation calling the government’s standard for defining who is poor as “problematic, outdated, and very unrealistic.”
The poverty threshold is the minimum income required for a family or individual to meet the basic food and non-food requirements, according to the PSA.
In an Aug. 22, 2026 statement, IBON added that the official methodology “understates poverty because its food threshold is based on a bare-minimum, least-cost basket while non-food needs are not directly and adequately costed.”
It further noted that the high costs of food, housing, electricity, transportation, education, healthcare and other basic expenses should be accounted for in setting the poverty threshold.
At least seven posts with spurious claims, uploaded by several FB users and pages including Ball Updates (created May 3, 2024), have so far received 10,762 reactions; 4,402 comments and 11,207 shares.
