FOOD: India Learns from Kenya’s Experience

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Mar 14 1996 (IPS) - A group of Indian officials left here Thursday planning to implement what they had learnt about Kenya’s approach to manufacturing supplementary foods to improve efforts to feed millions of malnourished children and mothers at home.

The team — officials from the UN World Food Programme (WFP)’s India office, the Indian government and private business from the sub-continent — spent two days visiting House of Manji in Nairobi, one of the largest food blending factories in Africa.

The firm, which manufactures cheap, high quality products, has delivered more than 13,000 tonnes of blended food and over 9,000 tonnes of biscuits to the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the WFP and numerous non-governmental organisations (NGOs), since it began production in 1992.

“All our products are fortified with vitamins and minerals as per recommendations from WHO (the World Health Organisation), WFP and UNICEF,” said Stuart Allison of the House of Manji.

“Our products are used in therapeutic feeding centres and supplementary feeding programmes, in refugee camps, centres for displaced persons and schools and shelters within the urban slums,” added Allison, who said they were also used to feed the elderly people and the chronically ill.

“The (blended) food, called Unimix, is very easy to prepare,” explained Pieter Dykhuizen of the WFP. “It takes less than 10 minutes to cook. And you can live on it for years and stay healthy.”

Dykhuizen said the WFP began distributing Unimix, made from soya beans, maize and millet, and high-protein energy biscuits in Kenya following an influx of refugees from Somalia in 1991.

“The Somali situation triggered the setting up of the blended food factory here,” he said. “Since then we have been distributing the food to Somali, Southern Sudanese and Ethiopian refugees here.”

“Recently, orders for Kenyan-produced supplementary foods have come from as far away as North Korea,” added Dykhuizen, who is based in the WFP headquarters in Rome, Italy, and who believes blended food is an answer to malnutrition, which affects more than 800 million people worldwide.

According to the WFP official, supplementary and weaning foods primarily benefit children, pregnant women and lactating mothers because of their high protein, vitamin and mineral composition and are “extremely important in Southern Asia where gender inequality creates an unequal distribution of food”.

A programme to this effect is already under way in India, according to Purnima Kashyap, the country’s WFP programme officer in the Asian country, where the WFP is feeding some 2.2 million malnourished children and pregnant women.

“There is misconception around the world that India has attained self-sufficiency in food,” Kashyap said. “This is not true. The majority of people in India don’t have the purchasing power to buy food.”

According to Dykhuizen, the WFP imports 25,000 tonnes of blended food each year from the United States, where the first blended food factory was set up in the 1950s, to feed pregnant women and malnourished children in India.

N.K. Jerath, senior general manager of the state-owned Modern Food Industries (India) Ltd, said his bread-making company — one of the largest in Asia — has now diversified into food blending to provide cheap, high quality food for the poor.

“We supply the food to the country’s poorest states, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar,” he said. “The two states also happen to be India’s most populated, constituting about 22 percent of the country’s population”.

B.N. Gupta, who runs the giant Indopol Flour Mills in the state of Haryana, said he came to Kenya, along with his technical manager, to study new technology used by the House of Manji.

“We want to update our machinery,” said technical manager Rajeev Khandelwal. “We are appealing to the WFP to assist us to acquire the machine that the House of Manji has bought from Switzerland. If we get the machine, we will double or triple our production.”

The firm blends various types of food into a product called Indiamix. Some of it is made in the form of a chapati (a flat pancake) and some as bread. “You just add a little water or milk and cook it for a period of four to five minutes and eat it,” said Gupta.

But Jerath said his industry, the largest food blender in India, aims to go a step further by updating its method of processing. “We want blended food that is ready to eat…blended food that does not require cooking,” he said.