Daily Times

KARACHI: Pakistan is facing a silent crisis of malnutrition that is among the worst in the world and has not improved for decades.

There is dire need to speed up the efforts to not only fight the challenges Pakistan was facing nowadays but put up a unified front to counter malnutrition in Pakistan. Pakistan sustains one of the worst nutritional rates and government has initiated many national level programmes to counter malnutrition in Pakistan.

But the successive government have also been slow in taking steps required to not only ease the ongoing malnutrition emergency but to put the country on track to achieve healthy nutritional states. Ministry for Planning and Development and Health Ministry are seemed less coordinated on this vital matter and there has been no concrete steps taken to wipe out the scaling up nutrition in Pakistan.

All provincial governments should approve and implement Provincial Multi Sectoral Nutrition Strategies by allocating/arranging required financial and human resources.

The enactment of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Protection and Promotion of Breastfeeding Bill and called other provinces and federal government to take necessary steps for implementation of breastfeeding laws such as re-activating infant feeding boards and breast-feeding committees.

There should be increased efforts to make the scaled up nutrition a reality.

The government’s sheer commitment to lower the staggering child and mother mortality rates in Pakistan would stem out scaling nutrition through multi sectoral nutrition policy.

Planners and experts of the should take up the success stories of Brazil and Peru in this regard, and could draw on lessons of those initiatives and civil society should advocate for people-centered approaches, demand for nutrition to be included at the national policy level and also promote and implement nutrition interventions for mothers and children, health experts opined.

Globally, nearly half of all deaths (some 2.8 million) annually among children under the age of five are attributable to under-nutrition.

Malnutrition is not only confined to children but is also rampant among women of reproductive age suffering from anemia, usually related to iron deficiency as well as wasting among poorer communities that are food insecure.

In Pakistan, malnutrition is widespread among all ages, and progress to address social determinants over the last several decades had been very slow.

According to the National Nutrition Survey, one-third of all children are underweight, nearly 45 percent are stunted, 15 percent are wasted, half of them are anemic and almost one-third of these children have iron deficiency anemia.

Periodic or seasonal food insecurity is reported by almost 40-50 percent of families in certain provinces, especially in Balochistan, Sindh, South Punjab and parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Fata. These are also compounded by poor and unhygienic living conditions, little access to safe water and adequate sanitation that exposes children to high rates of intestinal infections and diarrhoea.

Existing poverty alleviation programmes such as social safety nets like Baitul Maal, Zakat programmes or Benazir Income Support Programme have great potential for reaching those caught in the spiral of food poverty, viewed by an economist Agha Saiddain.