Malnutrition, a column from July 2013

Last week there was the Battle Creek Enquirer preempted Linda Jo's
column, so here's an extra one from the archives.

I just read a most depressing article about the terrible effects of 
malnutrition, stating that it causes 45% of the deaths of young
children all over the world. These dreadful problems begin with
conception--or even before, if the mother is malnourished before
becoming pregnant.

“An estimated 900,000 lives could be saved in 34 countries if 10
proven nutritional interventions were scaled-up to 90% of the world,”
according to Helen Briggs, British broadcaster and member of BBC
News. She goes on to say that “Poor nutrition leads to the deaths of
about 3.1 million under-fives annually.”

I realize that other countries have worse problems of malnutrition
than ours, but even here in America, many families are suffering every
day from not having adequate and appropriate food to eat. And sad to
say, whatever the reason for their poverty, it’s their young children
who suffer the most.

The effects of all of this are incredibly tragic--and they are also,
according to Briggs, very expensive. As she puts it, “According to a
recent United Nations report, malnutrition is estimated to cost the
world $3.5 trillion dollars (£2.3 trillion in English terms)--or $500
for every person in the world in healthcare and lost productivity.”

A team led by Prof Robert Black, of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School
of Public Health, Baltimore, US, which has studied this terrible problem
ever since 2008, says that though there has been some recent
improvement, more than 165 million children had their height as well
as their general health--and even their minds--affected negatively in
2011 alone. And of that number, approximately 50 million have been
negatively affected by low weight and who knows how many have
been affected mentally.

One of the most depressing factors in all of this is that as the
population grows and people have to move into cities to find work,
inevitably farms will become less worked or will disappear altogether.
As a result, it will become even more difficult to feed millions
nourishing, fresh vegetables, especially in countries such as China
and India.

I surely wish America could do more to help this problem, but our
House and Senate seem to have trouble agreeing on anything. As a
result, they don’t seem to concern themselves sufficiently with
suffering in other countries--or even in our country.

I hate to sound excessively negative in my columns. It’s much more
enjoyable to talk about unselfish, productive, loving people and
concepts, and I try to emphasize the positive whenever I can, but this
whole world-wide problem of extreme malnutrition is a situation of
gravest concern.

I know that many conservatives feel that our government is handing
out food and money far too much, but in reality less than 1% of our
federal budget is given to other countries in foreign aid - see
http://borgenproject.org/foreign-aid-2/  I wish they would realize
just how great the needs are these days and how extremely harmful it
can all be to the young and hungry.

I just learned that the Methodist Church here in Bellevue has rented a
downtown building to use for free food for those who need it. That
church has been generous for many years, providing food from
downstairs of the church, but now they are expanding their program.
It seems to me that our country--our world--needs a lot more of this
kind of generosity.