SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE AND FOOD SECURITY IN ASIA AND THE PACIFIC
The picture for children underweight is in many ways more troubling. Although it is not possible to produce aggregate data for the region as a whole, in many countries more than one quarter of children under five are malnourished. More than half the world’s underweight children, around 79.5 million, live in South and SouthWest Asia alone.6
Monitoring progress This broader concept of food security is much more relevant to everyday needs and particularly those of the poorest people. It is, however, more difficult to assess than a narrower concept based only on food availability. In practice, the best way of monitoring food security is to look at outcomes – to count how many people are going hungry. For this there are two principal measures, which are also used as the food targets for the first Millennium Development Goal (Box I-2).
It should be emphasized, however, that this is an incomplete picture. The statistical information is often weak, especially for highly food insecure areas. In the case of underweight children, for
Box I‑2 – The MDG nutrition indicators
The Millennium Development Goals use two indicators for nutrition: •
Proportion of population undernourished – The proportion of the population consuming less than the minimum level of dietary energy requirement. FAO estimates this for each country using three key parameters: the minimum number of calories required for an average person, the average amount of food available per person for human consumption, and the level of inequality in access to that food, based on income.
•
Prevalence of underweight children – The proportion of children aged 0-59 months who fall below the median weight for age of the NCHS/WHO standard reference population by more than three standard deviations. In a normally distributed population, only 0.13 per cent of children would be expected to fall below this standard.
example, data are missing for all Pacific island States, except Fiji and the Federated States of Micronesia. Furthermore, FAO’s core database, FAOSTAT, covering cereals, oils and meats available for human consumption, has complete data only up to 2005.
The first measure addresses consumption, typically by assessing the proportion of the population whose food intake falls below the minimum dietary energy requirement. The second involves physical ‘anthropometric’ measurements to assess the nutritional status of children under five, to arrive at the proportion who are underweight – who weigh less than they should do for their age.
However it is measured, poor nutrition is a serious problem for adults, undermining their health and reducing their capacity to live and work to their full potential. For children, the consequences are even more serious and potentially fatal. This is because poorly nourished children are far more susceptible to the many health dangers that assault them in the first few years of life – and have less resistance to infection and disease. Across Asia and the Pacific, around 3.8 million children die each year before reaching the age of five,7 and around half these deaths, over 1.9
On either of these measures, the Asia-Pacific region presents a disturbing picture. The most comprehensive data on undernourishment are available only up to 2005-2006, and thus prior to the most recent food crisis, but even these showed 16 per cent of the region’s total population, 542 million people, were consuming less than the dietary minimum.5 21