UNICEF report: They go together

In the developing world, one in four children aged from birth to five years old is undernourished. Lack of enough healthy food “is an underlying cause” of 53 percent of all deaths of children under the age of five—about 5.6 million a year—according to a UNICEF report released May 2.

It also shows that countries able to resist imperialist economic domination have done much better in feeding their children.

Undernourishment stunts mental and physical capacities. It makes children unable to resist disease and recover from it. Underfed girls later become mothers with reduced chances of healthy pregnancies and successful breastfeeding.

Throughout the developing world children living in rural areas—where the food is grown—are almost twice as likely to be underweight as urban children. This underscores the social nature of child malnutrition. Food is treated as just another commodity on the capitalist market, and the most vulnerable—women, children, the poor—lack access to the most basic necessities of life.

Where developing countries are under the control of global capital, efforts to improve the nutritional status of the population through measures such as food subsidies can be subject to the veto of the World Trade Organization or investor nations that control their economies.

The head of UNICEF is Ann M. Veneman. She was formally appointed by United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan. However, since its creation in 1946, UNICEF has always had an executive director from the United States. Veneman was known to be favored by the Bush administration, in which she served as agriculture secretary from 2001 to 2004. In the Bush cabinet, she worked to promote globalization and expand export markets for U.S. corporate farms. She has close connections with agribusiness and was on the board of directors of Calgene, the first company to market genetically engineered food. The facts in this report contradict her political leanings.

Impact of colonialism, imperialism

“Progress for Children, a Report Card on Nutrition,” states that 146 million children under five are underweight. The majority of these children live in South Asia. India, with 57 million underweight children, and Pakistan and Bangladesh, with 8 million each, account for half the world’s total. This is the only part of the world where girls are more likely to be underweight than boys: 47 percent versus 44 percent. Capitalist India has been going through rapid technological growth in some areas of its economy, but this has only widened the gap between rich and poor.

Sub-Saharan Africa, where 28 percent of under-fives are underweight, has more such children now than in 1990. Parts of West and Central Africa have done better, partly due to efforts to support exclusive breastfeeding for infants and community-based health care.

The North Africa/Middle East region has growing rates of child malnourishment, led by Yemen (46 percent), Sudan (41 percent) and Iraq (16 percent). Prior to the 1991 Gulf War, United Nations sanctions and the current U.S.-led invasion, Iraq was among the most advanced countries in the region.

Panama, another country invaded by the U.S. in 1989, is the only country in the Americas where the rate of underweight children has increased since 1990.

Gains in Cuba, China, Vietnam

Socialist Cuba, by contrast, has made the most gains of any country in the world, reducing the rate of underweight children by over half between 1996 and 2000, to 4 percent, and under-five child mortality to seven per 1,000 live births.

The latter figure is comparable to developed nations and is better than the overall figure in the U.S., where racism and poverty pull down the average.

All this was accomplished in spite of the four-decades-long U.S. blockade and the loss of the Soviet bloc as its major trade partner.

The biggest decrease in underweight numbers has been in the 86 million children under five in China, going from 19 per cent in 1990 to 8 percent in 2002. With its huge population and strides in improving child nutrition, China accounts for much of the worldwide progress in this area.

Vietnam also saw a sharp reduction in its malnutrition rate among children under five—from 51.5 percent in 1985 to 25.2 percent in 2005.