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HEALTH: Half of World’s Underweight Children in South Asia

Juliana Lara Resende

UNITED NATIONS, May 3 2006 (IPS) - Poor nutrition remains a global epidemic that contributes to the deaths of some 5.6 million children under five every year – more than half of all child deaths, according to a new report launched by the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF Tuesday.

In the last 15 years, the percent of underweight children has fallen just five percent in developing countries. More than a quarter of children the developing world remain underweight, around 146 million. South Asia – particularly Bangladesh, India and Pakistan – has by far the worst situation, where 78 million children under five are underweight.

“The lack of progress to combat under-nutrition is damaging children and nations,” said UNICEF Executive Director Ann Veneman.

The report highlights the crucial impact nutrition has on a child’s ability to survive and to learn effectively, a necessity for escaping a life of poverty.

Undernourished children also have lowered resistance to infection and may die from common childhood ailments. For example, a shocking “10.5 million children are dying from largely preventable diseases such as diarrhea”, according to Veneman.

At the same time, “if the mother is not adequately fed while pregnant, the child is much more likely to be born underweight”, Flavio Valente, technical coordinator of the non-governmental organisation Brazilian Action for Nutrition and Human Rights, told IPS.


UNICEF’s director of its programmes division, Allan Court, adds that if a baby is born underweight, he or she might be condemned to join the 1.3 million others who die every year before the first month of their lives is completed.

The problem is complex, Valente emphasises. “It is during pregnancy and within the first two years of a child’s life when a considerable part of the development occurs,” he said.

Children who do survive these first critical years “may be locked into a vicious cycle of recurring sickness and faltering growth, often with irreversible damage to their cognitive and social development”, according to the report.

Children’s ability to learn and attend school is consequentially threatened, although education is an essential ingredient for improvement in the lives of the poor, concluded Valente. “If we don’t invest in children’s nutrition, we’re not investing in our future, and we will be then completely failing to achieve our goals of ending poverty and hunger.”

Under the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), agreed to in September 2000, the world should achieve a 50 percent reduction in poverty and hunger; universal primary education; reduction of child mortality by two-thirds; cutbacks in maternal mortality by three-quarters; the promotion of gender equality; and other key quality of life targets by 2015.

Although the Latin America and Caribbean region has a lower prevalence of underweight in the world, there is great inequality at the country level. According to Valente, half of all poor Brazilian children suffer from anemia, a disease strictly related to nutrition patterns.

“In some places of the northeast of the country, schools provide children with cookies and Coke, which is not food in terms of nutrients,” Valente said, referring to the growing problem of obesity and over-nutrition.

UNICEF’s nutrition chief Rainer Gross confirmed that there are many countries, including Brazil, where national surveys are not being conducted on a regular basis, leaving policy-makers with a lack of data on the problem.

“In Brazil, the population is totally unaware of its rights, and even if they knew about their rights, they wouldn’t know to whom they should turn to in order to get them. And even if they knew to whom they should turn to, they wouldn’t have the opportunity to do it since they lack self-confidence for it,” Valente told IPS, stressing the necessity of empowering communities to properly address nutrition issues.

Jean-Luis Sarbib, World Bank vice president in charge of the African region, joined Valente Tuesday at a panel discussion following the launch of the new UNICEF report, saying that by “empowering communities and reducing inequality, you increase the potential of people at the bottom of the society to contribute to growth”.

The report notes that the famine-prone Eastern and Southern Africa region has not made measurable progress to meet its MDG targets, with one third of children remaining underweight. It says the situation in West and Central Africa is better thanks in part to campaigns to support breastfeeding for infants and community-based health care.

In the end, experts agreed that interventions, although challenging and complex, can be successful. Relatively inexpensive remedies range from vitamin A capsules and iron and iodine supplements to eliminating unsafe feeding practices.

“We will only make progress when child nutrition becomes central to global and national development policies that safeguard child nutrition, and must be linked with better nutrition knowledge in families and communities, as well as other basic health services like disease control, safe water and basic sanitation, and backed up by adequate emergency planning and response,” the report said.

“It is a matter of combining educational policies, supporting teenager policies, providing young women adequate health care and assuring women of reproduction age are being properly fed. It is not an isolated solution, but it is possible,” Valente concluded.

 
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