South Asia has highest number of undernourished children: Unicef
DHAKA, May 2: Nearly half of the children in South Asia under the age of five are underweight, and despite some progress, the impoverished region is far from reaching the goal of halving hunger by 2015, the UN children’s agency said on Tuesday.
“South Asia is not on target” to meet the goal, Unicef’s Harriet Torlesse said in releasing a world report on child nutrition.
South Asia, home to 1.5 billion people, or a fifth of the world’s population, has the highest level of underweight children — about 46 per cent of all children under the age of five — compared to 28 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa, Unicef said.
Worldwide, the report said 27 per cent of all children under age five in developing countries — or 146 million children — are underweight, and inadequate nutrition contributes to more than half of all child deaths, or 5.6 million per year.
Almost three quarters of the world’s undernourished children under age five live in 10 countries, and more than half are in just three nations — India, Bangladesh and Pakistan – Unicef said.
It said India accounts for 57 million — about 47 per cent of its under-five population — and Bangladesh and Pakistan for 8 million each.
But Bangladesh, an impoverished nation of 144 million people, has made considerable progress in improving child nutrition, the report said. The percentage of underweight children dropped to 48 per cent in 2004 from 66 per cent in 1990, it said.
“Bangladesh is on the right track, but the figures are still very high, and more work needs to be done,” Torlesse added.
Bangladesh has managed to greatly reduce iodine deficiency — which affects brain and nervous system growth — with iodized salts, and curb night blindness with vitamin A supplements, the report said.
It said Pakistan and India are making modest improvements, but their progress is currently insufficient to reach the UN target of halving hunger by 2015.
Most South Asians live on less than a dollar a day and lack access to sufficient food, health services, sanitation and safe water. Inadequate diets result in stunted growth and poor immunity against infectious diseases that can affect performance in school and productivity at work later in life..—AP
