ISLAMABAD: The main cause of recent deaths in Tharparkar district is a surge in morbidity and mortality rates among children and adults rather than drought in the area, according to UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator Timo Pakkala.

In a statement on Friday, Mr Pakkala termed the nutrition crisis in Pakistan ‘a silent emergency’ and called for urgent attention and investment. “The situation is bound to recur, unless root causes are addressed,” he warned.

Quoting summary of the 2013 Nutrition Information System data, he said that 21 per cent of the children were acutely malnourished in areas adjacent to Tharparkar, mainly Umerkot and Sanghar.

He said that reports in early March highlighted a rising number of malnutrition-related clinical admissions and child mortality in the Tharparkar district.

The 2011 National Nutrition Survey states that 44 per cent of under-five children in Pakistan are stunted, 32 per cent underweight and 15 per cent suffer from acute malnutrition.

He urged the Sindh government to improve the funding for nutrition programmes in Tharparkar and other districts from its development budget.

On their part, the Unicef, WFP, WHO and FAO and their partners were seeking $11.67 million from donor countries to scale up nutrition and other support initiatives for over 1.3m people for a year in Tharparkar and surrounding districts, he said.

The UN humanitarian coordinator for Pakistan said that more funds were urgently required to scale up support for nutrition interventions, including sustainable development solutions, to tackle the crisis in the drought-affected Tharparkar region.

Mr Pakkala said: “Resilience is what we are after here. Crisis and disasters are naturally unpredictable. Creating silent communities is what bridges relief and development efforts, and this requires investment.”

The United Nations and its partners have been providing nutritional support in Sindh since 2010, assisting 1.7m children and 800,000 pregnant and lactating women through malnutrition management, nutrient supplementation, and health and nutrition counselling.

The UN’s scaling up plan would help establish 44 community-based malnutrition treatment sites, provide emergency health services, build and rehabilitate water harvesting structures, establish health and nutrition surveillance systems and provide livelihood support, concentrated animal feed and vaccination of small ruminants.

Those interventions would complement the support so far provided by government authorities from all over Pakistan that during the past six months distributed more than 15,000 tons of food items, including wheat, rice and food packs to families in need and vaccinated 2.2m livestock.