October 05, 2007	Friday	Ramazan 22, 1428

PESHAWAR, Oct 4: The NWFP government with the financial assistance of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) has launched a universal wheat enrichment project to reduce iron deficiency among children and women.

The project was launched in three flour mills in Peshawar, Karak and Batkhela on Thursday.

“The project will be completed across the country by 2013,” said Mohammad Naeem Butt, president of the NWFP Flour Mills Association, at the launching ceremony.

The project “Enriching Food and Enriching Lives” had already been launched in 15 mills in Sindh and 32 in Punjab by the CIDA/Micronutrient Initiative (MI) in collaboration with the government, he said.

MI provincial coordinator Khalid Iqbal said that the National Nutrition Survey report 2002-03 had been made as baseline for launching the project. According to the survey report, 30 per cent children and 50 per cent women in Pakistan had iron deficiency anaemia.

He said that a recent report of the WHO had cited iron, vitamin-A and iodine as the most prevalent and critical nutrient deficiencies.

He said that malnutrition had affected 14.8 per cent children, stunning in children 35.5 per cent, low birth weight 30 per cent, anaemia 29 per cent, iron deficiency anaemia in mothers 50 per cent, vitamin-A sub-clinical deficiency 25 per cent, iodine deficiency 20-30 per cent and zinc deficiency in 41.4 per cent mothers and 37 per cent children.

According to the National Nutrition Survey, 1.2 per cent children had visible goitre, 1.3 per cent palpable goitre and 22.9 per cent urinary excretion because of iodine deficiency. Around 9.9 per cent pregnant women suffered from vitamin-A deficiency and 7.8 per cent from night blindness.

Mr Iqbal said the factors leading to malnutrition were poverty, debt burden, drought, stagnant agricultural growth, low literacy, poor access to health facilities and lack of birth-spacing.

The MI coordinator said that mill owners would be imparted training in flour fortification (FF), quality control and micro-feeders at roller flour mills to be installed at the cost of Rs3.4 million. Likewise, he said that a monitoring and evaluation system would be put in place to assess the impact of FF on anaemia in order to replicate the project in other parts of the province.

He said that a system had been developed for the capacity-building of local health professionals for testing and monitoring the fortified flour. He said that in the NWFP a person consumed 124kg of wheat annually while the total annual consumption of wheat was 3.38 million tons which, if fortified at the mills, could bring down the incidence of anaemia among children and women.