UN, Indian Officials Agree India Worse Than Pakistan, Bangladesh in Food, Hygiene

[Hutchroy]

Food Shortages

Amongs all the other issues stalking Pakistan, there is now the increasing problem of food scarcity. An estimated 77 million people go hungry in the country, says a report released on Wednesday by Washington’s Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, noting that Pakistan’s concerns in this regard continue to intensify even though the global food crisis subsided last year. The factors leading to this situation include resource shortages and the weather, with drought-like conditions leading to reduced crop yields in late 2009 and early 2010. The report warns that food shortages may lead to widespread violence if steps are not taken to feed the hungry.

It is true that we have been exceptionally unfortunate in factors that are beyond human control. Pakistan’s per capita water availability is amongst the lowest in Asia and water scarcity has become endemic in recent years. Our luck failed us even when the heavens finally opened up, and the extensive flooding currently being witnessed in many areas is bound to have a further adverse effect on crop yields and, consequently, future food availability. While little can be done about such realities, it is time the country woke up to the fact that poor planning and systemic failures have also contributed in great measure to food shortages. Crop yields continue to be below their potential because of archaic agricultural practices.

While well over 90 per cent of the country’s decreasing supplies of water are allocated to agriculture, inefficient irrigation and poor drainage have produced waterlogging and soil salinity across massive expanses of farmland that therefore do not produce successful harvests. Little attention has so far been paid to these issues, despite the fact that ours is an agriculture-based economy. Similarly, the need for land reform and the manipulation of food supply chains by vested interests have been talked about for years but remain unaddressed. The country’s population is growing at a rapid pace and will require increasing stocks of food, water and other resources. It is time Pakistan started planning for the future and addressed issues of food production and shortages.

 

[Guynextdoor]

Talking about newspaper articles, here is one I saw recently in the Hindu Business line by Mohan Murti, former Europe Director, CII. It is based on some serious reporting in European newspapers, not based on hearsay or unsupported data like Zaveri's piece:

A few days ago I was in a panel discussion on mergers and acquisitions in Frankfurt, Germany, organised by Euroforum and The Handelsblatt, one of the most prestigious newspapers in German-speaking Europe.

...... n blah blah blah...
Perhaps we are the architects of our own misfortune. It is our sab chalta hai (everything goes) attitude that has allowed people to mislead us with impunity. No wonder Aesop said. “We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to high office.”

The Hindu Business Line : Is the nation in a coma?

Now why don't you open a blog with similar articles on Pakistan? There will be many many more. Why do you muse anyway? It's not that people are intersted in your musings?

 

[Hutchroy]

DAWN.COM | Editorial | Contaminated water

Contaminated water

Dawn Editorial
Sunday, 08 Aug, 2010

Aa if the grim picture painted at a workshop in Islamabad about the quality of our drinking water supply is not worrying enough, widespread flooding in the country is raising fears of even further contamination.

A five-year nationwide water quality monitoring programme run by the Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources found that the percentage of drinking water that is contaminated and thus unfit for consumption is as high as 87 per cent.

Also of grave concern is the fact that some 70 per cent of Rawalpindi’s water supply lines carry water contaminated by sewage. Another alarming statistic is that practically all of the five million acre feet of industrial and domestic wastewater produced each year in the country (equivalent to the capacity of Mangla Dam) is discharged directly into freshwater bodies without any treatment.

How far-reaching the effects of water contamination can be has also been brought out in a local case study which found cancer and other sickness-causing trace metals, including manganese, lead and mercury, reaching people indirectly through the consumption of fruit, vegetables and fish grown in contaminated water.

Given this picture, it is natural to wonder whether the national drinking water policy of 2010 will be able to do any better in cleaning up our water supplies than previous ones. If there was one thing lacking in the slew of earlier water policies and actions in this regard during the 2000s, it was the backing of legislation which has been in the offing for several years now.

No doubt we already have the 1997 Environmental Protection Act but only a specific safe drinking water act — which is already in place in many countries — can provide the teeth needed to enable us to effectively implement our national drinking water policy as well as the national standards for drinking water quality.

 

[Vinod2070]

A grim thread.

I think only bigots will look to score points on such issues.

And incompetent inadequate fools too. All nations in South Asia have a long way to go to provide decent life to their poor.

 

[RiazHaq]

Here's a Time magazine story of a finding that Indian children's exceptionally short heights are attributable to poor sanitation in India, not malnutrition:

Children in India are exceptionally short, with their stunted growth historically attributed to malnutrition. However, new evidence is suggesting that food, or lack of it, is not the cause. Noticing that Indian children were smaller than their counterparts in Sub-Saharan Africa — who are, on average, poorer and hence less well fed — researchers have been coming to the conclusion that diseases stemming from poor sanitation are more to blame than diet.

More than half of India’s population — over 600 million people — do not use a toilet because sanitation is inaccessible or unaffordable. At the same time 61.7 million Indian children are stunted, the highest prevalence in the world.

The atrocious hygiene that results from widespread lack of sanitation is made worse by the density of the population. With large numbers of people openly defecating, fecal-oral-transmitted infections are common, leading to diarrhea, with such diseases draining growing children of vital nutrients. Growing up in environments teeming with fecal pathogens has a permanently debilitating effect, experts say. Overtime, a large build-up of fecal germs in the body can also manifest as severe intestinal diseases.

Last month, a group of economists, epidemiologists, pediatricians and nutritionists gathered at a conference in New Delhi to push for recognition of poor sanitation as the cause of child stunting in India. “It was striking that each of them [participants] had something to say about sanitation being important for child health,” Sangita Vyas, of the Research Institute for Compassionate Economics, which coorganized the meeting, told TIME. Such claims emerge at a time when the results of a massive government survey into the availability of sanitation have become available and converged with long-standing epidemiological literature.

Rural Indians remain hard to convince that this is a health epidemic, researchers say, because stunting creeps through communities, affects “everybody on average” and there are “no real dramatic cases,” Princeton University economist Dean Spears, who is currently at the Delhi School of Economics, told TIME. “The sorts of dramatic tragedies that persuade people [to change] don’t happen,” he says.

(MORE: Are Toilets a Feminist Issue? Why the Burden of Bad Sanitation Falls on Women)

A few years ago, a government sanitation program was implemented in half of 60 villages in Ahmednagar, Maharashtra, Western India. After the program, Spears and fellow economist Jeff Hammer found on average, that the height of children in the experimental group had increased by about one centimeter, relative to those in the 30 villages where the program had not been introduced.

“Widespread child-stunting in India is a human development emergency,” Spears says. “It matters for everybody.”

Poor Sanitation, Not Malnutrition, May Be to Blame For India’s Notoriously Stunted Children | TIME.com

 

[[Bregs]]

Sick thread