ABSTRACT
Joint government and international development programs operating in Ifugao neglected to address seriously large-scale and local social structural inequalities and cultural relations influencing and operating in the communities in which they maintained their operations. These inequalities and cultural relations included socioeconomic and gender relations, food sharing ideologies and practices, and ideologies of assistance, each of which significantly influenced the incidence of hunger in Ifugao. The United Nations Children’s Fund/Philippine government program did not train health professionals to discuss with Ifugao people the historical, social development of poverty and malnutrition in the Philippines. In Ifugao, international development agents made a conscious attempt to raise Ifugao women’s gender status in the early 1990s. Development agents working within Ifugao viewed the provision of volunteer labor by lower class Ifugao people for program activities as being a reasonable and important expectation. Policies of food supplementation programs also disregarded cultural values and social relations operating within Ifugao.
