Living on $1.25 a Day Won’t Win an S&P Upgrade: William Pesek

If President Benigno Aquino wonders why the Philippines isn’t shaking its junk-bond status, a visit to the local supermarket might set him straight.

There, he will find that food prices are surging and pushing growing numbers of his people into extreme poverty -- the less-than-$1.25-a-day kind. The Manila-based Asian Development Bank says as many as 64 million more Asians may suffer this fate in 2011, negating almost every other economic metric of progress.