Observing World Food Day
Today is World Food Day, a day commemorated each year to call for an end to world hunger. The day is to remind us of the need to ensure that everyone has access to safe, affordable and nutritious food at all times to live a healthy, happy life. However, achieving food security is necessary but not sufficient condition to prevent malnutrition and ensure adequate nutrition for all. Understanding the pathways from inadequate food access to malnutrition is important. When there is an uncertain access to nutritious, safe and varied food for a household or an individual, that household or individual is food insecure.
Food insecurity can cause child wasting, stunting and micronutrient deficiencies; both directly through compromised diets and indirectly through impact on infant feeding. Recurrent infections and disease are serious contributing factors to wasting and stunting in children. Nutritional knowledge and food habits, as well as improved sanitation, may play a role by moderating the effects of household food insecurity on diet, health, and nutritional outcomes.
Nutritious and fresh foods often tend to be expensive. Thus, when household resources for food become scarce, people choose less expensive foods that are often high in caloric density and low in nutrients. The negative effect of food insecurity on diet quality has been documented in low, middle and high-income countries alike, particularly in urban settings. There is a need for implementing and scaling up interventions aimed at guaranteeing sustainable production and access to nutritious foods, breaking the intergenerational cycle of malnutrition perpetuated by undernourished girls becoming undernourished mothers, at risk of giving birth to infants with low birth weights. Any action plan or policy implementation must pay special attention to the food security and nutrition of infants and children under five, school-age children, adolescent girls and women. Close inter-ministerial and cross-sectoral coordination among the ministries of food security, water, health and climate change, and a strong alliance with civil society, is also needed.
Genetic research could offer new ways of resisting crop pests and disease; agricultural science could deliver new ways of enriching soil and enhancing yields; and better education could encourage more careful preservation and use of resources. But all these would require years of concerted political engagement on an international scale. Food, either wasted on the plate or withered in the soil, is not just a problem for the market. It is a problem for the worlds politicians, and one that becomes increasingly ominous, everywhere, with each successive harvest.
