Framing Child Nutrition in Developing Countries: A Human Security Perspective
Raghavendra Madhu and Denese M. Neu
Child deaths due to the insidious malnutrition epidemic are a seminal challenge to human security in low and middle-income countries. In addition to hunger interfering with human potential, poor nutritional status leads to long-term health inequalities and disabling conditions. Reducing child mortality is one of the Millennium Developmental Goals, and one of the primordial processes to achieve it is through improving child nutrition. However, the nutrition intervention programs as a part of the broader development framework have scarcely percolated in the deprived communities. With changing agendas in global health it is time that child nutrition is embedded in the inclusive and evolving framework of human security. This will also have a futuristic bearing on development of the human security metrics. National initiatives have been limited to vertically systematized nutrition alleviation programs. The policy direction developed here suggests that child nutrition policies be integrated into comprehensive approaches like that of human security. Such integration shall provide an opportunity to research the issues in policy congruence when implementing newer frameworks.
I appreciate your concern about child malnutrition epidemic in middle age countries but to remove this we have to make some efforts. An estimated 80 percent of the stunted children just live in 14 countries of the world, this estimates have to cut down if we need a nutritious world. Also we have to appreciate countries like India, Ethiopia, Haiti etc successes in scaling up nutrition and improving policies, programs in recent days, which is a great sigh of relief. All these countries work impressively well in the field of child development, in India stunted growth rate decreases from 36 percent to 23 percent in just 6 years. Same condition is with Ethiopia they cut their stunting rate from 57percent to 44 percent which is a result of the actions by their government and the UNICEF. But not all the countries have same condition, they still were far behind than others when it’s up to child nutrition and stunted growth. Stunted growth in child is a direct consequence if poor nutrition in first 1000 days.
I agree with this discussion. Many agencies talk about food security, but the issue is really nutrional security dealing with widely prevalent micronutrient deficiencies even in high income countries. This is simply not adequately adressed in global initiatives and funding nor in national levales. Georgia and Nigeria recently succeeded in fort ifying salt with iodine and is moving on flour fortification with folic acid. But thew UK report in Lancet recently showed low iodine levels in pregnant women. So many countries are simply in denial or ignoring MND issues. Ted Tulchinsky MD MPH