The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations celebrates World Food Day on October 16th. This was the date in 1948 when the right to food was first formerly recognised by the global community as a basic human right.

A shocking 47 percent of children under 5 in India still suffer from malnutrition and regularly go to bed hungry. One in eleven children born in the country are currently dying before reaching their sixth birthday, with half of these deaths attributable to malnutrition.

CINI (the Child in Need Institute) argues that undernourishment severely disempowers future generations. Cycles of poor nutrition, ill health and reduced capacity for learning and working emerge and prevent community development.

The charity’s founder, Dr. Samir Chaudhuri, commented, “Chronically malnourished children are like houses built on weak foundations… they become sickly… and struggle in school because of learning difficulties resulting from the lack of vital nutrients while their brains are developing. This also makes it hard for them to hold down a steady job when they grow up.”

CINI has been at the forefront of the fight to tackle malnutrition amongst the poorest of the poor, who are most in need. The charity provides support and advice to pregnant women in order to help them improve and protect their own health and that of their families. In areas where CINI’s projects are well established, child malnourishment and mortality rates have been halved.
“It is urgent we face up to this humanitarian crisis”, says Dr Chaudhuri, “children are currently suffering and dying unnecessarily, and the situation is particularly bad in India and the wider the South-Asian region. Effective measures to cut rates of child malnutrition have been developed, but greater political and public will is needed if India and her neighbours are going to have any realistic chance of reaching the Millennium Development Goal to halve the proportion of people suffering from malnutrition before 2015.”