Addressing malnutrition
The paradox
of malnutrition is that one side of it has people who do not get enough while, on the other side, there are those who are overweight and obese due
to eating the
wrong food
While Bangladesh has come a long way from the famine riddled days of the 70s, a recent finding by the World Food Programme (WFP) states that, still today, 40 million people in Bangladesh are deprived of adequate nutrition. This is a disturbing find because if the county strives to become a middle income state then universal nutrition must be ensured. However, in tackling the hunger issue, we must also look back at the seemingly insurmountable challenges which Bangladesh overcame after liberation in order to bring down acute hunger. Once, in Bangladesh, the sole objective of a large number of people was to find enough food to survive.
We are not in that dire situation anymore. Today, dying of hunger is not heard though malnutrition is still a matter of worry. The focus now is to provide the right sort of food for our people for proper mental and physical development. After launching of the WFP report, the honourable finance minister rightly underlined early marriage as one of the core causes, leading to the malnutrition of many young women, experiencing pregnancy at a very early age.
Also, we feel that in rural Bangladesh, the traditional role of a wife does not include looking after ones own nutritional needs because, for ages, the accepted social part of the wife was that of a person who sacrificed her own self for the fulfillment of others.
Consequently, in many cases, the women had to compromise on their nutritional needs, which resulted in poor maternal health plus other chronic post-natal health complications. For Bangladesh to be free of hunger, the emphasis has to be on teaching people what a balanced diet actually means. To achieve this, the development partners should widen their operations, taking nutrition based programmes to the char areas where large communities live isolated from mainstream societies.
In addition, the ministry of rural development can launch a nationwide nutrition drive, inspiring families with small open spaces to grow essential vegetables and pulses. The paradox of malnutrition is that one side of it has people who do not get enough while, on the other side, there are those who are overweight and obese due to eating the wrong food. For logical reasons, our approach to extirpate hunger must also include a campaign to raise awareness of a bulging waistline.
Thankfully, breakthroughs in rice research have given us a variety of rice seeds which are flood resistant and can be planted all the year round. This is laudable though to make a healthy nation, we also require round the year production ofvegetables plus a re-evaluation of nutrition, especially for girls and mothers.
