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Fifty million Indians under the age of 5 are affected by malnutrition. Rising food prices, says Unicef, mean that 1.5-1.8 million more children in India alone could end up malnourished
Rising global food prices could prove devastating for more than 1.5 million children in India putting them at greater risk of becoming malnourished, says the United Nations’ children’s organisation Unicef. Even before the current crisis, almost half of all Indian children showed signs of stunted growth, says Unicef. With two out of every five undernourished children in the world located in India, the addition of another layer of such children would be a huge burden on a country like India. Inflation in India rose to a new high of 7.61% for the week ended April 26, from 7.57% for the week before, making food prices spiral. Currently, inflation is at a three-year high. From steel prices to food items, rising prices are creating huge problems for people below the poverty line. Three hundred million Indians live on less than $ 1 a day, according to the UN. Unicef warns that food inflation could affect vulnerable women and children right across South Asia which has the largest number of malnourished children in the world. “We have huge numbers of people living in poverty, and a doubling of food prices. Those factors combined mean that we’re going to just create tremendous vulnerability. It’s a perfect storm. We have increasing malnutrition in an area that already has the majority of malnutrition in the world,” said Daniel Toole, Unicef’s regional director for South Asia, in Delhi recently. According to Unicef’s latest ‘State of the World’s Children’ report, India has the worst indicators of child malnutrition in South Asia: 48% of under-5s in India are stunted, compared to 43% in Bangladesh and 37% in Pakistan. Meanwhile, 30% of babies in India are born underweight, compared to 22% in Bangladesh and 19% in Pakistan. Unicef calculates that 40% of all underweight babies in the world are Indian. Convert all that into hard numbers and the figures are stark. Fifty million Indians under the age of 5 are affected by malnutrition. Rising food prices, Unicef says, mean that 1.5-1.8 million more children in India alone could end up malnourished. Branding it an “emergency of enormous proportions,” officials in the UN body called it a “silent tsunami”. According to the global watchdog, the price of rice has more than doubled in the last year, while wheat has increased over 130%. For every percentage point increase in the price of staple foods, the number of people who become “food-insecure” rises by 16 million, it warned. “At the current rate, we can project that 1.2 billion people (worldwide) will become chronically hungry by 2025.” “Policy action and programme action need to be implemented to mitigate the impact of increasing food prices,” said Victor Aguayo, chief of child nutrition and development at Unicef-India. Already, Unicef says, more expensive food is having an impact. “People are changing the way they eat,” said Toole. “Households that have three meals a day are going back to two. Or if they have two they are going back to one. That has a dramatic impact on child nutrition because children need to be fed frequently.” Elsewhere, it’s not the number of meals but the quality of the food they’re eating that is changing, he added. “Meat is very expensive and they have dropped that. So they are losing their protein source. That will have an impact on health and nutrition too.” In Bangladesh and Nepal people are using less oil, an important source of calories. Poor families that cannot afford rising food prices are having to save money where they can, and that also means spending less on healthcare and education. “We are starting to see that families are pulling girls out of school as they need to send them to work,” Toole said. “So our concern is we will start to see more incidences of child labour, and less frequenting of school, which has a long-term developmental impact on children and societies as a whole.” Food prices, he believes, will remain high for at least the next two years, and in that time it is children who will bear the brunt. So what needs to be done to tackle this crisis? First, the priority must be to feed the hungry across South Asia, says Unicef. In Afghanistan that means additional food aid. In India, Bangladesh and Nepal it means expanding school feeding programmes and midday meal schemes as well as more cash payments to the most vulnerable. Then, countries will have to build up their strategic food stocks. But to tackle the root of the problem there must be a significant investment in agriculture, especially small-scale farming, in seeds, in fertilisers, and in infrastructure. Countries will need to change, Unicef says, adding that India has focused on industrialisation and outsourcing of services, while just 2.2% of its national budget is invested in agriculture. “We need to do more as a country because of the long-term consequences of undernourishment, and we are not doing enough now,” M K Bhan, secretary of the department of biotechnology, said. In India, distribution of subsidised food to the poor through the government has failed miserably, officials say, with nearly one-third or even half of the food meant for the poorest of the poor siphoned off by corrupt officials. Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk, May 13, 2008
http://in.reuters.com, May 13, 2008
The Economic Times, May 13, 2008
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