Tuesday, August 4, 2009
UNICEF and Packaged Food
The international organisations are important players in the development process. But they must comply the rules and regulations of the country in which they operate. Recently UNICEF had violated the norms laid by India and distributed packaged food to the malnourished children.
The Times of India writes (4 August 2009)
That malnutrition is a severe health issue in India is well documented. There are differing views on how best to tackle the problem among experts.
The government's stated policy is to promote the use of freshly cooked food to mitigate the malnutrition crisis. This is a line endorsed by the Planning Commission and the National Advisory Council, and adopted by the ministry of women and child development (WCD).
It has now come to light that UNICEF imported millions of dollars worth of a packaged nutritional supplement, called Plumpynut, which is made by a French company. It gave them to severely malnourished children in several Indian states. This appears to have been done without consulting, or getting permission, from the relevant authorities here. While aid agencies are more than welcome in this country, they must follow the rules that are in force. If external agencies started making interventions as and how they please, without the government's knowledge, we have a problem on hand.
The indiscretion of the agency in this particular case is just one aspect of the issue. The debate over packaged and locally produced fresh food is of crucial importance. India has for long followed a system of providing hot food prepared from locally produced ingredients to children in need of nutritious food. And this is with good reason. A simple, balanced, freshly prepared meal has been proven to be both effective and beneficial to the health of the consumer. When Renuka Chowdhury - the former WCD minister - plumped for packaged food, she was roundly criticised. Packaged supplements cannot replace a diet of nutritious staples.
Moreover, it is not wise to import and use an alien product without fully investigating its merits and demerits vis-a-vis the foods that are being given now. Rooting for locally produced foods also acts as an incentive to local agriculture and livelihood practices. Whether seen as a health issue, or from an economic angle, local and fresh is the way to go in our fight against malnutrition.
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Under the Integrated Child Development Scheme, malnutrition in school-going children is to be combated by providing them hot cooked meals prepared
in anganwadis. Renuka Chowdhury once campaigned for nutrient-enriched packaged food instead and had her knuckles rapped by government higher-ups. Today, UNICEF is in the dock.
The international agency has been admonished for distributing ready-to-use fortified food apparently without authorisation, and asked to restore the money spent. But, reportedly UNICEF says its distribution of imported packaged food in Madhya Pradesh and Bihar was in line with World Health Organisation-stamped protocols on humanitarian intervention.
How many times will the government slam the rulebook on those who disagree with it? If the midday meal scheme debate is proving something of a periodic jack-in-the-box, surely that says something for relaxing the rules. If packaged food is being used the world over with good results, India needn't be an exception. If nutritional supplements in such food didn't have their strengths in terms of delivering health and hygiene, India's minister for food processing industries wouldn't propose the bundling of a processed food item with midday meals so that "the promise of quality and nutrition" can be kept.
That leads to the key question of the quality of cooked meals and standards of hygiene related to storage of raw materials and preparation. Thanks to local level callousness or corruption, substandard ingredients are in countrywide use. Disturbing headlines appear with sickening regularity about children falling ill and being hospitalised on consuming spoilt or contaminated food. Government data says 3,273 children were thus afflicted over the last three years.
Factor in unreported cases, and the number is likely to go up. If this is the situation under one of its flagship programmes, the government can hardly take the moral high ground with those advocating hygienic packaged food whether as a supplement or an alternative to cooked meals. Malnutrition is an urgent problem and UNICEF was actually doing something about it. Let's not make the ideal the enemy of the actual.
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