UNICEF: Poor nutrition is killing children, stunting growth

[AlphaCentauri]

Source: CNN

Hunger is stunting hundreds of millions of children in the developing world, and more than 90 percent of them live in Africa and Asia, UNICEF says.

Poor nutrition is one of the main killers of young children, the U.N. Children's Fund says in the new report "Tracking Progress on Child and Maternal Nutrition."

"The report we have launched draws attention to the fact that 200 million children under the age of 5 in the developing world suffer from chronic undernutrition," said Werner Schultink, UNICEF's associate director of nutrition.

A lack of food can impair physical, mental and social abilities, the report says, adding that proper nutrition is important for mother and child. The 1,000 days from conception until a child's second birthday are the most critical for development, according to UNICEF.



Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/africa/11/12/world.hunger/

---

Victims of Capitalism or bad luck?

[T Wolf]

1. Let them eat land mines is the US response. But at least we are giving them SOMETHING. nt

[Doctor_J]

3. Snark. And don't forget that the magic of the Free Market will soon rescue them

:rofl:

[JonQ]

2. Not really news

and I'd also add a victim in part of religious superstition and political manipulation, re the refusal of many of these nations to accept GM crops, burning them in some cases.

[skoalyman]

4. we will rescue them to death

:patriot:

[Igel]

5. "Victims of Capitalism or bad luck?"

For the most part, neither.

In some cases, in Africa they decided to go for imported cheap food and to focus on high-price cash crops for export. Sometimes the IMF nudged them, sometimes not. This made for a problem when food prices increased last year, but while malnutrition increased it's not as though it increased from nothing. That only holds for some countries.

In other countries they have drought or war. War isn't primarily because of capitalism--except sometimes the local, home grown variety ("I can fight and take over this mine and be rich and powerful"--hardly a concept that originated after Adam Smith). In many cases the war is simple tribalism, competition for resources to be used by a collective. The drought isn't really a capitalist phenomenon, either.

In some cases the problem is that they haven't built infrastructure. The internal politics allow rulers and groups to siphon off aid and resources for their own families and clans or tribes. This means a country is less a unified whole and more of a patchwork of efforts, which hardly leads to the kind of infrastructure needed to be very efficient and self-sustaining at more than subsistence levels.

Even if you remove drought and conflict from the equation you'd still have problems. In at least one case the effects of cyclical drought over time were fully mitigated by aid. It would be the case that during drought there'd be starvation and almost no fertility, causing the population to be reduced for the next stint of good agricultural output. Instead, during the last couple of droughts the population increased. Then, during the last non-drought period the country *still* couldn't feed itself--the population had increased beyond the carrying capacity of the agricultural land in good weather, given the people's agricultural techniques and crop choices. Now, back in drought, the country has a real problem. Part of it is because we told them there was no consequence to overpopulation and we'd make sure they didn't starve even as their population skyrocketed; getting them to commit to smaller families should have been first, or at least been obtained as the food aid was delivered. Yes, it's culturally insensitive. Tough.

In most other countries with severe malnutrition problems you still find fertility at 4 or 5 or even 6--meaning that the population's soared in recent decades.

Malthus has been proven wrong in many cases, usually because either population stopped increasing (violating one of his conditions), or because of increased efficiency in distributing food resources or increased agricultural output (moving the baseline for resources). There's no reason for Malthus to always be wrong. It's likely he was right in many cases in the past.

[AlphaCentauri]

6. It's interesting that in socialist countries the governments are always to blame

for food shortages, now when the free market dictate who gets the food there are many factors that can cause the problem but not the free market it self, interesting.