ISLAMABAD: Special Assistant to the Prime Minister Dr Sania Nishtar informed an international conference on Thursday that Ehsaas welfare programme had been geared to promote equality and healthy food security and ensure social protection.

She said Ehsaas covered all main aspects of the human development of which healthy diet is a core component. Nutrition, therefore, was an important part of the Ehsaas framework and the programme looks at it holistically.

Dr Nishtar said that ‘transforming food systems for health, equity, and sustainability’ had been organised by the Inter Parliamentary Union (IPU) and World Food Programme.

Sania stresses importance of nutrition in Ehsaas framework

The SAPM presented Pakistan’s perspective on nutrition, saying that it focused on social protection operations. “Nutrition is embedded in the Ehsaas strategy post- Covid. The pandemic has shown that it is possible to place nutrition at the heart of poverty alleviation objectives,” she said.

The meeting identified entry points for parliamentary action to ensure production, processing, distribution and consumption of food responds to health, equity and sustainability imperatives.

The IPU is a global organisation of national parliaments with 179 members out of 193 countries in the world.

Other speakers were Gerda Verburg, UN Assistant Secretary-General and SUN Movement Coordinator; Agnes Kalibata, UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy to the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit; QU Dongyu, Director-General, FAO.

Published in Dawn, June 25th, 2021