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03/03/2006:

"Lack of Food Not Main Cause of Child Malnutrition, Study Says"

Rampant child malnutrition in poor countries is usually not caused principally by lack of food, nor are large, politically popular programs to feed schoolchildren the right way to tackle a problem stunting the intellectual and physical development of more than 100 million children worldwide, a new World Bank report says.

The irreversible damage malnutrition causes to children occurs by age 2, long before they begin primary school, and the bank contends that efforts to combat this scourge must concentrate on the brief window of opportunity between gestation and age 2, with a focus on teaching mothers to properly feed and care for babies and toddlers.

While many experts would agree with the bank's assessment of the evidence on malnutrition, its policy recommendations are sure to be controversial at a time when the world is pushing to halve poverty in the coming decade and school feeding programs are often seen as part of the solution.

The bank, the largest financier of antipoverty programs in developing countries, maintains in the report released today, "Repositioning Nutrition as Central to Development," that countries like India with staggering rates of malnutrition need to change their approach to speed up progress.

Nutritionists at the bank say programs should emphasize changing the behaviors of mothers — for example, to breastfeed exclusively for the first six months of life or seek quick treatment for their children's diarrhea and other common childhood illnesses, rather than directly providing food.
nytimes.com

How insane is this?