Malnourished children

The concerns of UNICEF as well as the WFP, articulated in their statement regarding the prospect of more than a million children facing undernourishment as a consequence of recent floods, should be a cause of concern for all.

As it is, more than fifty percent of our population is undernourished. In this category is a high percentage of children under five.

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Where malnutrition is an endemic phenomenon, the spectre of another million indigent children going without proper sustenance has serious long-term consequences for our country. It calls for urgently gearing up government programmes to ensure that the ominous prospect does not eventuate.

What is often lost sight of is the vulnerable period of its early years that a child is exposed to, to the adverse effect of malnourishment. The most vulnerable time of its life, when the child must have the required input of nourishment without which its mental faculty is likely to be stunted, is upto the age of two. If it can be provided for adequately till then, the child can grow up into a mentally sound individual subsequently.

It is an irony that while all focus is placed on restoring the physical damage of floods, and most funding is towards making up the infrastructural losses, the human aspect of the impact is all too often overlooked. The most vulnerable section, that is the newly born and its mother and the under-two years, are left in the lurch, unaccounted for in the plan of rehabilitation.

A stunted child grows into a mentally unsound boy or a girl and eventually a mentally frail person. One wonders whether we have ever done the mathematics of lost productivity and the opportunity cost of malnourishment which accretes overtime on lost national productivity.

While there is more than one contributive factor of malnutrition in Bangladesh the immediate need for balanced diet to the vulnerable groups over a sustained period of time would require the government's intervention alongside other international agencies', on top priority basis.