Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: Represen-tatives from the Ministry of Planning, Development, and Reform, businesses, agriculture sector, and the development sector are holding a two-day meeting to work out strategies on working together to stop the decline of nutritional status of people in Pakistan especially those of women and children.

The meeting is being organised by SUN Business Network (SBN) at Bhurban.

Speaking on the occasion, Additional Secretary Ministry of Planning, Development, and Reform, Mr. Zaffar Hassan said low nutrition status of people is one the biggest problems being faced by Pakistan. He said that that the overall policy and strategic environment is favourable for businesses and other stakeholders to work together to come up with innovative ways to tackle the menace of malnutrition.

He said that the role of the private sector in this respect was very important. He said that he hoped practical ideas from the deliberations in the workshop would be invaluable.

According to Chief Nutritionist, Ministry of Planning, Development, and Reform Mr. Aslam Shaheen, investments in mothers and children have the highest return and benefit the whole society. She said that “evidence suggests that an additional dollar invested in quality nutrition programmes will yield an average return of $16”.

The participants of the workshop agreed that nutrition sensitive actions need to take place in sectors complementary to nutrition and need to be designed to address the underlying causes of malnutrition in Pakistan. They said that investments require deliberate and appropriate planning and strategising for creating an impact on the nutritional status of people. The discussion also focused around providing incentives to progressive farmers from big businesses and subsidies by the government.

Those who attended the meeting included representatives from the government, businesses, development sector, including Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), Micro-nutrient Initiative, The World Bank, and FAO, and Fauji Fertilzer, and farmers.

The meeting was organized by Scaling up Nutrition (SUN) Movement which is a global effort to address malnutrition. Pakistan is a priority country for up scaling considering the high burden of malnutrition and related problems pertaining to fortification of food and its overall quality and safety. The meeting resulted in concrete decisions for mainstreaming business engagement in up scaling nutrition interventions in the country. These include strengthening of the business led SBN Secretariat; formation of working groups on key priority areas to highlight key bottlenecks in engaging business into improving nutrition efforts in the country.