CLAUDIO SCHUFTAN
schuftan@gmail.com
We live in an era of high expectations and poor outcomes. Resolving the problems of malnutrition in the world is an unpostponalble priority.
It is as much an ethical as a scientific imperative to tackle malnutrition in the world since the latter has become an embarrassment of global proportions.
Malnutrition in the world plays itself out in the corridors of national and international socioeconomic and political decisions.
In the past, economic development has been positively correlated to nutrition improvements, especially when linked to effective social mobilization and empowerment of the poor.
The battle against malnutrition in what is left of the nineties has to more decisively take the side of the poor; as concerned nutrition workers, we are accountable to them, primarily because we recognize the relationship between science, humanitarian concerns, ethics and contingent politics.
Freedom from hunger is at the very base of democracy; malnourished people will feed themselves adequately if given the resources. As concerned nutrition workers, we need to promote processes in which people’s felt needs become valid claims and the latter become recognized and enforceable rights.
Malnutrition handicaps, maims, decreases human physical and intellectual performance, burdens underfunded health and education systems and thus ultimately affects the economy and the chances of lifting countries out of underdevelopment.
We cannot continue to ignore the basic socioeconomic and political determinants of hunger, ill-health and malnutrition in the world; yet more patch solutions chat only scratch the surface of the problem will simply not do. The implementation of programs will have to be effectively decentralized to assure community ownership of the same; sustainability starts with local control. Succeeding in these tasks will require our fostering a mix of top-down and bottom-up processes interacting synergistically.
The dividends of world peace should afford the world, especially the North, the means to help those countries most in need, starting with Africa.
We therefore need to pledge ourselves to:
1. Create more political awareness about the problems of malnutrition. But this is not enough. Effective mobilization of resources for nutrition-relevant actions is now needed more than ever and we all need to help bring about such action.
2. Fully endorse the programs and plans of action of the Convention of the Rights of the Child, the ICN Declaration, the World Summit for Children and Agenda 21. All these represent solemn social contracts between governments and their people and we all need to influence our respective governments to pay this social debt by fulfilling the concrete state obligations embodied in such internationally endorsed documents.
3. Become more proactive advocates to influence the political processes in our respective countries to, among others, effect:
a) the quantity and quality of the distribution of social expenditures directed to food security, health and care of women and children;
b) the reinforcement of local and international institutional capacities to deal with the problem of malnutrition at its different levels of causality;
c) the delivery of services, the capacity building and the empowerment of beneficiaries needed to overcome malnutrition;
d) the strengthening of national human resources development in nutrition gearing it more towards national-nutrition-relevant contents and practices;
e) legislation for the compulsory iodization of salt and the implementation of other targeted interventions to eradicate iodine deficiency disorders;
f) the virtual elimination of Vitamin A deficiency; and
g) the condemnation of the practice of commercial promotion of baby formulas.
Finally, we all need to show our presence more visibly in the political arena by proposing and throwing our full weight behind all nutritionally-relevant actions. At the same time, we need to be more vocal and outspoken in opposing nutritionally-irrelevant or nutritionally- detrimental policies.
In the name of the needy of the world, our intention has to be to mobilize all our efforts and resources in the pursuit of achieving these nutritional goals for the mid-nineties. For whatever magic that date has, the countdown to the year 2000 is almost half way.
Claudio Schuftan
Saigon, Vietnam.