Malnutrition in Afghanistan steals away life expectancy

Malnutrition runs rampant in Afghanistan. Fourteen children die every half hour from preventable causes. The health system is unable to prevent the deaths due to alack of clinics staffing and beads.

Afghanistan's children are hit the hardest with hunger. Their mothers are often underfed too, so they are unable to supply infants with enough breast milk.

From the Pulitzer Center, writer Anna Badkhen tells the story of one infant who struggles with malnutrition.

Loose skin dangles around Mohammad Zakrullah’s angular pelvis and emaciated thighs when he squirms in famished discomfort. His newborn forehead and scalp glow ghostly purple, from the permanganate solution his mother, Chori Khul, has smeared on them, believing it would ward off hunger headaches. Next to his blue blanket, a rusted bukhari stove of soldered iron burns sharp coils of dry desert grass and donkey dung, and belches out more smoke than heat.

What can Chori Khul do for her son, 40 days old and already wasted, other than swaddle him in a hand-me-down shirt festooned with coins and two quilt coats that her other five children wore when they were infants? She squats by Mohammad Zakrullah, reaches inside her blue-and-white dress, and pulls out her right breast. Barren. No milk at all. Sucked dry by the gruel of life in the desert, by days of dividing up pittances of rice for breakfast, lunch, and dinner among her family of eight, who share the single room in a house raised with mud.

In Oqa, Chori Khul’s village of some 40 low houses that gape doorless at the endless desert of northern Balkh province, few have heard of the billions of dollars of international aid that has poured into Afghanistan in the decade since the U.S.-led invasion. Just as well. The money has made little difference in the lives of Afghanistan’s children, who continue to die at the second-highest rate in the world: Fourteen every half hour, largely from preventable causes such as acute malnutrition, of which Afghanistan has one of the highest rates in the world. Health care officials in Balkh province—population 2 million—estimate that levels of acute malnutrition among the children here range between 7 and 10 percent. This means that as many as 40,000 children in Balkh, mostly infants and toddlers, are teetering, like Mohammad Zakrullah, between life in destitution and death from hunger.
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A few women, Chori Khul’s neighbors, cram into the room to nod at little Mohammed Zakrullah in a kind of unsurprised resignation. The room smells of urine, dust, manure, and straw. It smells of the acrid smoke from the bukhari and of the opium smoked here—a traditional pastime in this part of Afghanistan, where the narcotic is smoked and drunk with tea as a cure for hunger, the common cold, muscle aches, stomach cramps, and woe. I ask the women if they have seen babies this malnourished in Oqa before.

Oh, yes, yes, they nod. All our babies look like that.

How much weight has Mohammad Zakrullah lost since he was born? His mother shrugs. No one in Oqa owns a scale.

Even if Mohammad Zakrullah pulls through, a centuries-old lifestyle and modern wartime laws already have scripted his life in this village. As a boy, he will collect tumbleweed under an agonizing sun for sale as firewood in Zadyan. As a man, he will draw murky water by rope out of an open well 75 feet deep. He will never have enough to eat, and his wife will grow old by her second child. He will smoke opium to take his mind off his hardship. But current statistics suggest that his hardship will not last very long: Despite international promises of aid and prosperity, the average life expectancy of Afghan men and women remains 44 years.

New stats on global hunger

A pair of new studies give us new statistics on the number of people hungry in the world and how much it costs. One study shows that there has been a decline in the amount of hungry people compared to 2009, but the number is still greater than before the global recession. Meanwhile, Action Aid has a new report that gives a dollar figure to how much hunger hurts the global economy.

From the BBC, we learn more about the two studies.

The FAO estimates there are 925 million undernourished people in 2010, compared with 1.02 billion in 2009.

But it warned that the fight to reduce hunger would face additional obstacles if food prices continue to rise.

A separate report from Action Aid estimates that hunger costs developing countries $450bn (£292m) a year.

The report says that 90% of these costs stem from lost productivity as a result of malnutrition, while the other 10% is due to higher health system costs.

Action Aid says this is more than 10 times the amount of funding needed to halve hunger by 2015. This is one of the eight United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The MDGs represent a global commitment by members of the UN to reduce poverty and improve lives by 2015.
Targets under threat

Food prices have risen sharply recently, with the price of wheat hitting a two-year high last month after a severe drought and fires in Russia devastated crops there.

Numbers of hungry in South Asia hits a 40 year high

The global recession has added 100 million people in South Asia to the numbers who are always hungry. This brings the number to a 40 year high, or just over 400 million total. These numbers are according to a new UNICEF survey of the region.

From the Taiwan Times, this Associated Press article further reviews the numbers.

The region's poor, who have borne the brunt of the economic trouble, desperately need governments to spend more money on food, health care and education to alleviate the crisis, said Daniel Toole, a regional director for the U.N. Children's Fund, or UNICEF.

At least 405 million people in South Asia suffered from chronic hunger in 2007-2008, up from 300 million in 20004-2006, according to a UNICEF report Tuesday.

"Without urgent, inclusive government response, the poor of South Asia, nearly 20 percent of the world's population, will sink further into poverty and malnutrition with long-term negative consequences for growth and development in the region and globally," the report said.

The report focused on the economic crisis's impact on women and children in eight South Asian nations _ Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

Nearly 33 percent of South Asia's 1.8 billion people eat less than the minimum recommended daily requirements. Three-quarters live in households earning less than $2 a day, the report said.

The poor spend more than half of their income on food, which has become more expensive and made life even more difficult for them, it said. Nearly half of the region's children are malnourished.

UNICEF also criticized India for not doing enough to lift the poor up during the period of economic boom. They say that their efforts were wasted instead on too much military spending. They also accuse Pakistan of the same high military spending, instead of helping those in poverty.

From the Financial Times, writer James Lamont covers this angle to the story.

Aniruddha Bonnerjee, an economic and social policy consultant for Unicef, said there had been “stagnation” in the fight against malnutrition and that stubbornly high food prices posed a growing threat to poor families. He warned that with India’s growth rates now almost half what they were two years ago, New Delhi would find it more difficult to boost spending on health, education and food to nurture its human capital.

“If there was no progress against malnutrition and hunger when growth was higher, how are you going to do it now?” he asked.

Mr Bonnerjee said some Asian countries had managed to halve poverty over five years during times of high economic growth; India was falling far short of that achievement. Mr Singh’s championing of “inclusive growth” was electioneering and had left large swathes of the population untouched, he said.

Unicef was also critical of high military budgets in the region at the cost of social protection. India is modernising its armed forces and projecting its power more widely than in the past.

“A number of countries in south Asia decide to invest in the military and not to increase investment in their people.” said Daniel Toole, Unicef’s regional director “Budgetary allocations can be more than 10 per cent in the military, while education is only 2 per cent.”