Photo by Meredith Baker

[Editor's note: This is a guest post written by Meredith Baker. Her bio may be found at the end of the article.]

This past winter break, I had the opportunity as part of my undergraduate program to travel to Nicaragua and participate in community development work. While I have witnessed considerable poverty before, the community of Nuevo Amanecer, Nicaragua, brought me to a new understanding of what abject poverty can mean.

While the people of Nuevo Amanecer have a variety of basic needs, such as access to clean drinking water (they walk three miles a day to get water because local wells are contaminated), malnutrition amongst children is perhaps the most visibly dire. According to a UNICEF report, iron deficiency impairs the mental development of 40%–60% of children in developing countries. It can not only lead to anemia, but is also estimated to lower the GDP of developing nations by 2% due to lower energies and therefore low productivity of the workforce. Vitamin A deficiency leads to destroyed immune systems in children under the age of 5 and approximately 1 million deaths each year.

One hundred families live in Nuevo Amanecer (meaning “New Sunrise” in English), a community founded only a few years ago with the help of the Long Island student group “Students for 60,000.” The community serves as a permanent residence for “squatters,” or people who would have otherwise settled illegally or on public land. It was heartbreaking to see the kids of Nuevo Amanecer running around clothed only in dirty underwear – the only pair some of them owned. Most of the children were very skinny, with twig-like arms and legs, rotting teeth, and swollen bellies as a result of malnutrition and hunger. A few toddlers I encountered had thinning copper-colored hair (hypochromotrichia), a frequent symptom of protein deficiency.

The people of Nuevo Amanecer had a community vegetable garden. However, there were never enough fruits or vegetables to go around. The diet for most consisted predominantly of rice: good for carbohydrates, but lacking many other essential nutrients. This made me wonder if there weren’t an inexpensive, easy way to provide fortified foods to help these kids meet their daily dietary needs. Perhaps if the people of Nuevo Amanacer were educated on the necessary macro and micronutrients their bodies needed, and perhaps if aid organizations were able to provide fortified food or multivitamins in greater supply, the community’s emaciated children could at least begin to look and feel like healthy children their age.

Coincidently, my favorite columnist, Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times, was also in Central America at the time, writing a column about malnutrition in Honduras, with suggestions for simple, cheap ways to supply people in developing countries with necessary nutrients. In his article, Kristof reminds us that lack of vitamins and minerals and nutrients can have dire consequences and that it is cheaper and easier to prevent nutrition related birth defects than to treat them.

According to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, the cost of fortifying food staples, such as sugar, salt, and flour with supplemental nutrients and vitamins can cost as little as 30 cents per person per year. One vitamin A capsule provides enough vitamin A for up to 6 months and costs around 2 cents. A three-month supply of iron pills is only 20 cents. This is a small price to pay for big returns.

Headed by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation, the new project is providing training sessions, agricultural education, and seeds to a fortunate 5,000 who own small portions of uncultivated land on the outskirts of Monrovia. The outcomes have so far been favorable. An individual, or more commonly a family enrolled in the program, can make around US$200 per season from red peppers (a fairly common crop in the area). For one young man participating, this meant a chance to go back to school. And the long term health benefits — not only to the individual but also to the community — that come from an increase in produce consumption are desperately needed: almost half of all children are affected by malnutrition.

The market gardens program, it is hoped, will encourage people in the areas surrounding a poverty stricken city to spread the once prevalent farming land back into communities. Seventy percent of the population in Montserrado once farmed their own land, but due to years of civil unrest, Liberia is currently utilizing a mere one third of the land available.

Food security is thus not a new problem, and although there are currently many valuable interventions in operation, the problem is reinforced daily by the overwhelming presence of slums within the region. Perhaps one of Liberia’s greatest challenges, the increase in slum population — now the greatest percentage in all of sub-Saharan Africa according to the UN–Habitat report — is inexorably linked to the country’s political climate and social dynamics. Liberia has been in civil war intermittently since 1980, when a military coup led by Samuel Doe ushered in a decade of authoritarian rule. Since then, relatively brief patches of peace alternated with unrest, with the situation settling down in 2005 with the democratic election of the current president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. The country is still reeling from years of instability and is attempting to recover from shifts in every area of society, most notably in a debilitating mass migration into Monrovia that has severely impacted food availability.

FAO’s current attempt to reinstate small farms is limited in its reach. For now, those included in the program are the relatively well-off that own land in the first place, and thus the entire slum population is counted out. The goal that the idea will “catch on” may be working, as it is laying a base for an increase in food production that could later benefit the entire region, including those living in slums. So far there have been positive outcomes not only for crop yield, but also for the personal goals and changed lives of the women and men involved.

For more info on the urban garden project: http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=87798

For more general information on Liberia: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/li.html

For more info on food insecurity in sub-Saharan Africa: http://www.kahawacafe.com/pubs/ASR/12No1/Clover.pdf

For information on the housing crisis and prevalence of slums in Liberia: http://www.theperspective.org/articles/2007/0123200703.html

In a study published in the October 2009 issue of Economic Development and Cultural Change, two researchers from Tufts University, Steven Block of the Fletcher School of International Affairs and Patrick Webb of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, explored the links between smoking, food expenditures, and childhood malnutrition in Indonesia. A survey was administered to households in rural Java, most of which were poor. Based on the surveys, the researchers found that households with at least one smoker spent 10% of their budget on tobacco and that 70% of the money used to purchase tobacco apparently came from funds that would otherwise be used for food. Households with at least one smoker spent 68% of their budget on food, in contrast to nonsmoking households, where the average food expenditure was 75% of the total budget.

The 7-percentage point difference in food spending between households with at least one smoker and households of nonsmokers might not seem substantial, but the researchers found that this decrease in food expenditures was associated with a difference in childhood nutritional status as measured by height-for-age. The reduced nutritional status of the children may be related to the types of foods being purchased; in households with at least one smoker, less money was spent on fruit, vegetables, and meat, which are important sources of nutrients in the heavily rice-based diet of most rural Indonesians.

It is already known that smoking puts people at risk for many diseases, including cancer, heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and childhood asthma and that tobacco use causes more preventable deaths than anything else. This new report shows that we have another compelling reason to advocate for reducing tobacco use: reducing child malnutrition.

More information:

Economic Development and Cultural Change Press Release on smoking and malnutrition study

WHO: Tobacco and the Tobacco Free Initiative

CDC: Smoking and Tobacco Use

Credit: Peter Casier/ World Food Programme

You can see it in the stunted growth of North Korean children and in the quarter of the country’s potential military conscripts that will disqualify due to “mental retardation caused by malnutrition”. Often overshadowed by the country’s nuclear program, North Korea’s food crisis is worsening. Though not as serious as the famine of the 1990s, the current food shortage is causing chronic malnutrition in millions of North Koreans, and it is largely a man-made disaster.

As a state party to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) since 1981 and a signatory to other international human rights treaties (International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women), the North Korean government has a responsibility to uphold the right to food. Instead, the actions of North Korea’s government have exacerbated the effects of the food crisis through economic policy, prevention of equitable aid distribution, and tight controls on the population, which prevent people from leaving to search for food (those who cross the border illegally into China have been arrested, detained, and even executed by North Korean authorities), according to an Amnesty International report. Despite Amnesty’s lack of direct access to North Korea, this excellent report draws on testimonies from North Koreans and reports from other sources to provide a detailed account of the political context and rights violations that pertain to the food crisis.

With North Korea’s persistent disregard for human rights, it’s hard to imagine change in the near future. But we cannot just wait for regime change. As Kay Seok points out, it is crucial for the international community to focus not only on nuclear weapons, but to exert pressure on North Korea to end human rights abuses and enact economic trade policies that allow its people to get enough to eat.

See also:

N. Korea blacks out cell phone use to stop news of worsening food crisis – Thaindian News, Oct 25, 2008

The Real Crisis in North Korea? Food – TIME, Oct 6, 2008

Hunger and Human Rights: The Politics of Famine – U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, 2005

Op-ed: Hungry for Human Rights – Washington Post, Sept 28, 2005