UNICEF says poor nations fail their underfed children

[Xudeedi]

By Irwin Arieff

 

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Developing nations must do far more for their undernourished children to meet a longtime U.N. goal of halving the world's underweight infants by 2015, the U.N. Children's Fund UNICEF said on Tuesday.

 

Despite steady progress in many poor countries, the pace has lagged in others, threatening to cripple related U.N. initiatives aimed at controlling disease, boosting education rates and spurring economic growth, UNICEF said.

 

Since 1990, the starting point set by the United Nations, the rate has fallen just 5 percentage points from 32 percent to 27 percent, it said. The goal is to bring the rate to 16 percent by 2015. Currently there are about 146 million children under 5 who are moderately or severely underweight.

 

With only 9 years left to meet the goal, "this report card shows clearly that the world must alter its priorities in order to reach the Millennium Development Goal target of reducing child undernutrition by half," UNICEF Executive Director Ann Veneman said.

 

"But it shows just as clearly that reducing undernutrition is attainable if the lessons of the past 15 years are applied," Veneman said in a foreword to the new report. The millennium goals were set at a U.N. world summit in New York in 2000.

 

Inadequate nutrition contributes to an estimated 53 percent of all deaths among infants under 5, and nutritional intervention is most effective when it takes place during the first two years of life, the U.N. agency added.

 

Among steps it recommended were promoting breast-feeding as the exclusive source of nutrition for the first six months of life, improving the diet of pregnant women to push up birth weights and ensuring adequate supplies of iodised salt, iron, Vitamin A and other vital micronutrients in children's diets.

 

More than half of the world's underweight children live in South Asia, according to UNICEF figures. Another 15 percent are in East Asia and the Pacific, 12 percent in West and Central Africa, 11 percent in Eastern and Southern Africa, 5 percent in the Middle East and North Africa, and 3 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean, it said.

 

Well over half of the world's undernourished children live in just 4 nations, India (57 million), Bangladesh (8 million), Pakistan (8 million) and China (7 million), the report said.

 

Other countries with the largest numbers of undernourished include Nigeria, Ethiopia and Indonesia, with 6 million each; the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Philippines, with 3 million each, and Vietnam, with 2 million, UNICEF said.

 

Source: Reuters