Vusimuzi Bhebhe
04 September 2010
HARARE – Less than 10 percent of Zimbabwe’s children aged two and under are consuming a diet that is “minimally acceptable”, the World Food Programme (WFP) warned in a report published last week.The UN agency said the majority of Zimbabwean toddlers were at risk of malnutrition due to a lack of balanced diets.“Only 8.4 percent of children under 2 are consuming a diet that is minimally acceptable,” WFP said in the latest Global Update: Food Security Monitoring released on Tuesday.The WFP report corroborates a recent joint survey by the Zimbabwe government and the UN Food and Nutrition Council FNC) which found that more than a third of children aged below five in the southern African country are malnourished.The Zimbabwe National Nutrition Survey carried out in January 2010 revealed a worsening problem of chronic malnutrition, posing long-term survival and development challenges for the southern African country that is battling to shake off the effects of a 10-year recession and political strife.Once a net food exporter Zimbabwe has faced food shortages since President Robert Mugabe’s controversial land reform programme that he launched in 2000 and which has seen agricultural output plummet because the government failed to provide blacks resettled on former white farms with inputs and skills training to maintain production.A unity government formed by Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and Mugabe last year is pushing to revive the economy although it has to date failed to ensure law and order in the mainstay agricultural sector where mobs of supporters of Mugabe’s Zanu (PF) party continue harassing the few remaining white commercial farmers.
http://www.thezimbabwean.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=33944:wfp-warns-of-toddler-malnutrition-&catid=52&Itemid=32
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