MALNUTRITION: Indonesia: Major firms launch initiative to fight malnutrition in kids

Rangga D. Fadillah, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta 06/14/2011
The Indonesian government welcomed on Monday a public private partnership (PPP) initiative to fight malnutrition in Indonesian children called Project Laser Beam (PLB), which is supported by the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) and several globally renowned enterprises.
The secretary of the Office of the Coordinating People’s Welfare Minister, Indroyono Soesilo, said the initiative was critical to help the country end child hunger and poverty, particularly in East Nusa Tenggara and Papua, two of the poorest provinces.
“The government of Indonesia is committed to lifting people out of poverty and giving every Indonesian child a healthy start in life. PLB will kick off very soon under the coordination of my office,” he said at a press conference on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum on East Asia in Jakarta.
He expressed his gratitude to Unilever, Kraft Foods, DSM and Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) as well as to three local companies — PT Tiga Pilar Sejahtera, GarudaFood and Indofood – for their participation in PLB.
“PLB is a creative new pillar in the fight to end child malnutrition, which we believe will be a major contributor to attain the Millennium Development Goals [MDGs],” said Indroyono who is also a candidate for the Food and Agriculture Organization’s director general for the 2012-2015 period.
PLB is a five-year, US$50 million project that aims to eradicate child malnutrition. The initial focuses of the initiative will be Indonesia and Bangladesh where child malnutrition rates are unacceptably high.
In Indonesia, more than 37 percent of under fives go to bed hungry, while in Bangladesh, the rate reaches 48 percent.
Pradeep Pant, Asia Pacific president director of Kraft Foods, said his company contributed around $10 million to the initiative. He elaborated that PLB would cover programs, such as teaching locals about sustainable farming, assisting them to create micro enterprises and providing nutrition education to mothers and children.
“In my opinion, this initiative is likely to succeed because it has three required pillars, which are sustainability, big scale and conducted repeatedly,” he said.
Unilever chief executive officer Paul Polman argued that participating in the initiative was very important for his company’s business. Ending child malnutrition and preparing children to be healthier and more prosperous in the future would be a way for the company to expand its market.
“Our business won’t work if the market doesn’t work,” he said.
The continued commitment of Unilever, Kraft Foods and several new local and international partners demonstrated confidence that the world was on the right track in fighting hunger in a new and innovative way, said the director for public policy, communications and private partnerships of WFP, Nancy Roman.
“When the government and businesses work together, we can do more than what we can do individually,” she said.

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2011/06/14/major-firms-launch-initiative-fight-malnutrition-kids.html

MALNUTRITION: The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (Gain) and New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad)

Lusekelo Philemon : 25th January 2011

The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (Gain) and New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) have signed a memorandum of understanding which aims to significantly reduce malnutrition in Africa.

The pact aims to develop a five-year joint programme which fully integrates nutrition security into the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP).
According to a Nepad statement, the agreement was co-signed on Sunday in Addis Ababa during Nepad’s steering committee meeting by Jay Naidoo, chair of the Gain Board, and Ibrahim Mayaki, CEO of the Nepad Planning and Coordinating Agency.
In Africa, it said, one in four people suffer from malnutrition, twenty-five per cent of children are undernourished and forty per cent are stunted while fifty three per cent of pregnant women are anaemic.
“Malnutrition is costing millions of lives, in particular women and children. It also prevents millions of people from contributing to the continent’s growth and development,” said Naidoo, adding:
“It is directly linked to achieving the MDGs, including poverty reduction, child mortality, maternal health, AIDS and many other infectious diseases.” He also said, it’s estimated that countries lose up to 3 per cent of GDP due to malnutrition.
“We know solutions exist to reduce malnutrition through a number of simple, targeted and cost-effective interventions,” Naidoo said in the statement.
For his part, Ibrahim Mayaki of Nepad said, “Since malnutrition has multiple causes, improvement requires multi-sectoral action across the food security, agriculture, social protection, health and educational sectors.”
The official further said, “This poses a significant delivery challenge for national governments. Although tested, affordable and effective interventions are available; implementation has not yet reached the desired scale.”
Under the agreement, the statement said, Gain and Nepad will assess existing policies, practices and capacities in agriculture, nutrition and food security before engaging the private sector, donors and national decision makers in a bid to facilitate coordination of actions geared to expanding access to more nutritious food.
http://www.ippmedia.com/frontend/index.php?l=25418

MALNUTRITION: Without breastfeeding, MDGs are beyond reach

For 50 years the world has looked for magic bullets to tackle world poverty, an issue which gnaws at the conscience. What we have learned is that there is no single recipe for health and well-being, and that the complexities of development vary everywhere.
But one thing we know for sure is that to be healthy you must eat, and eat properly. Increasingly, solving this apparently simple part of the development equation has been slipping away, eroded by rising food prices and a ballooning world population.
The global leaders meeting in Canada at the G8 and G20 meetings confirmed that low investment in nutrition has been a serious weakness in development policy for decades, and is blocking achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Malnutrition accounts for 11 percent of global disease, killing three and a half million children every year, while two billion people suffer from vitamin and mineral deficiencies.
In Sub-Saharan Africa the issues are acute: close to 40 percent of children are stunted, and in Africa, half of pregnant women are anaemic. A quarter of the population is undernourished.
It is not yet clear if this is a Pauline conversion that will cause the G8 to give real effect to its words, but recognising “nutrition security” is certainly reshaping how development is viewed. Why?
Nutrition may not be a fashionable science, but it holds the key to tackling many of the obstacles to human development. The medical journal, The Lancet, has nailed down what nutritionists have known for years – that the correct intake of nutrients and vitamins from conception to two years old determines a whole set of outcomes for both individuals and the society they live in. Poor early nutrition leaves the individual open to a host of diseases, turning common ailments such as colds and diarrhoea into killers.
The conclusion: unless you improve nutrition, the MDGs are beyond reach. The good news is that solutions are at hand and they do not just rely on government. Food is one part of the economy which the private sector drives, and it is showing willingness to help address the problem. Thus new efforts to blend science and marketing are succeeding, proving it is possible to beat chronic undernutrition through better infant and maternal feeding practices – concentrating on exclusive breastfeeding up to six months, better complementary foods from six months – and through fortifying staple foods. Education for all about healthy diets will bring massive dividends to strained health systems.
In the past five years the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition has worked with Governments, NGOs, food companies and producers in more than 25 countries to fortify foods with key vitamins and minerals lacking in consumer diets. These products, as varied as cooking oil and flour in Africa, yoghurt in Bangladesh, biscuits in India and soy sauce in China, are already reaching close to 300 million consumers every day, with direct cuts in rates of illness.
In South Africa, neural tube defects fell by 30 percent after folic acid was added to maize meal and wheat flour through a national effort. In Morocco, the prevalence of folate deficiency in women decreased more than 9 percent and the prevalence of anaemia fell more than 3 percent over a two-year period following the fortification of wheat flour with iron and folic acid.
Millions of Egyptians are consuming fortified Baladi bread, the staple food of the country, thanks to the Egyptian Government supporting the costs of the folic acid and iron that are being added to the wheat flour used to make the bread. Malawi has succeeded in integrating nutrition across Government Ministries and, with strong support from the President, has seen a significant decline in malnutrition.
There are plans are to extend these programmes to one billion people across the world in the next five years. None of this is novel. Fifty years ago Nelson Mandela said that “poverty goes hand in hand with malnutrition and disease. The secondary results of such conditions affect the whole community and the standard of work performed”.We can take inspiration from Nelson Mandela to make nutrition security central to realising every person’s human rights. Food and nutrition security are modest and highly achievable goals vital to almost half of humanity. According to a study prepared for G8 leaders the issue of nutrition could be solved for just $10 billion a year. In terms of aid budgets let alone global economies, this is a sum – to use the language of economic commentators – which is eye-wateringly modest.
We must ask ourselves why we would invest in vaccines, bed nets, schools and economic models designed to lift women, children and families out of poverty, if they are compromised right from the start. We must first change this root cause of malnutrition, so that every mother and every child has a real, fair, and full chance at living a life to their full potential.
Marc van Ameringen, is the Executive Director of GAIN – Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition.
http://www.vanguardngr.com/2010/08/12/without-breastfeeding-mdgs-are-beyond-reach/