GLOBAL HUNGER INDEX 2.35cr without enough food in Bangladesh

The Global Hunger Index launched in Bangladesh on Monday said that over 2.35 crore people in Bangladesh were undernourished due to lack of adequate supply of food.

South Asian countries Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Nepal performed better than Bangladesh in reducing hunger, according to the GHI jointly published by Ireland-based humanitarian agency Concern Worldwide and Germany-based non-government aid agency Welthungerhilfe. 

Bangladesh ranked 88th among the 117 countries categorised under ‘extremely alarming’, ‘alarming’, ‘serious’, ‘moderate’ and ‘low hunger situation’ in relation to their people’s access to food as per their need.

Bangladesh fell in the serious category along with 42 other countries, mostly in Africa, where conflicts are rampant and economic opportunities are scarce, according to the report.

The Central African Republic is the only country facing an extremely alarming hunger situation while the four others facing an alarming hunger situation are war-torn Yemen, Chad, Zambia and Madagascar.

‘We are doing much better compared to African countries and many Asian countries such as India, Pakistan and Afghanistan,’ said Agriculture minister Mohammad Abdur Razzaque before launching the report at CIRDAP in the capital.

Hunger is a poverty issue and there is no way around the hunger problem unless the capacity of people to buy food improves, he added.

‘While trying to increase employment opportunities through agricultural industrialisation, the government is running specialised programmes to improve people’s access to food,’ said Razzaque.

He said that the government decided to increase the number of people receiving subsidised rice at Tk 10 per kilogram to seven million from the present five million.

The hunger situation in the countries studied was measured taking into account the proportion of undernourished population in the nation concerned, prevalence of stunting and wasting among the children under five years and the mortality rate among under-five children.

Bangladesh scored 25.8 on the index whereas Sri Lanka scored 17.1, Myanmar 19.8 and Nepal 20.8. According to the index, the less the score the better the performance.

The hunger index said that 14.7 per cent of Bangladeshis were undernourished whereas the percentage of the undernourished population in Sri Lanka is 9, Nepal 8.7, Myanmar 10.6, India 14.5, and Pakistan 20.3.

In 2001, 20.8 per cent of Bangladeshis were undernourished, according to the index.

Concern Worldwide’s Bangladesh country director AKM Musa said that division-wise nutrition statistics underlined a wide gap in people’s access to food they needed.

In Sylhet, 42.7 per cent children under five are stunted against the national average of 31 per cent, he said.

Musa noted that the percentage was the lowest in the coastal district of Khulna with 25.5 per cent children suffering stunting.

The north-eastern district of Sylhet also has the highest rate of child wasting with 10.4 per cent of its child population under five suffering from the condition, he further said.

He added that the lowest 7.3 per cent child wasting rate was found in Rangpur.

Child wasting represents acute malnutrition causing its victim to weigh less than it should be with a certain height.

Stunting is chronic malnutrition affecting the growth of children in relation to their age.

The prevalence of child wasting increased in Bangladesh in 2014 to 14.4 per cent from 12.5 per cent in 2002, said the hunger index.

The child stunting and mortality rates, however, steadily fell after 2000, showed the hunger index.

Welthungerhilfe policy and external relations officer Fraser Patterson presented an overview of the hunger index findings highlighting that climate change was worsening the global hunger situation.

Helvetas advisory services department head Rupa Mukerji in a video message said that global hunger continued to increase for the third consecutive year in 2018 after three decades of declining.

Speakers at the launching ceremony also put emphasis on making people aware about nutritious food in order to improve the situation.

They said that Bangladesh performed well in eradicating poverty but it could do even better.

Concern Worldwide, Helvetas and Welthungerhilfe jointly organised the event.

Bangladesh National Nutrition Council director general Shah Nawaz and Institute of Public Health Nutrition national nutrition services line director SM Mustafizur Rahman attended the event among others.

Just last week a government and World Food Programme joint study revealed that one in every eight households in the country could not afford nutritious food.

The study titled ‘Fill the Nutrition Gap Bangladesh’ calculated the cost of a nutritious diet to be Tk 174, twice the amount needed to meet daily energy demand: Tk 80.

The energy demand can be met by a combination of wheat and rice but a nutritious diet would have to be a combination of staples, tubers, legumes, animal-source foods, vegetables, fruits and oil, the study remarked.

‘Comparing the cost to the actual food expenditure, all households can afford an energy-only diet, but at least one in eight, or 13 per cent, people cannot afford an optimised nutritious diet,’ said the study in its executive summary.

It estimated that over half of the country’s 16 million people could not afford a balanced diet.

Another study released last week by the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies revealed that a third of the people living in the northern district of Kurigram could not afford three full meals a day.

The study said that almost 71 per cent people were living in poverty in Kurigram.

News Courtesy: www.newagebd.net