Plan aims to tackle childhood malnutrition
Print Edition
WHILE urban parents worry that their children are obese, kids in the country’s underdeveloped rural regions are often malnourished.
Malnutrition threatens to hold back a generation of rural Chinese.
Pickles and cold steamed buns are what 5-year-old Mai Xiaoying takes to school for lunch.
“I just want something hot (to eat),” she said.
If she takes the long walk home each noon, she can probably eat hot steamed buns, but meat and fresh vegetables are luxuries out of her reach.
Mai, who lives in the city of Wuzhong in west China’s Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, is visibly underdeveloped compared to her urban peers.
According to a 2010 survey, stunted growth among the under-5s in China’s poor rural areas was over 20 percent, while 8 percent were classed as underweight, nearly eight times the figure in urban areas.
More than 13 percent of rural children suffered from anemia.
Mai is among 40 million rural children in 680 poor counties in China, who need education and better lives, but the problem of malnutrition is the most pressing.
In 2011, subsidized school lunches were introduced, with 16 billion yuan (US$2.6 billion) a year allocated to 23 million students in about 100,000 rural schools.
Deng Yan’en, 12, from the mountainous Gaoxian County in central China’s Henan Province, is among the 70,000 students in the county to have benefited from the nutrition program.
Before that, he only ate one meal a day and was often left hungry.
He hopes his younger brothers can also be helped by the scheme, so that he doesn’t need to secretly stash the milk his school distributes every day to take home and share with his siblings.
New plan to help
The country has provided free daily nutritional supplements — a concoction of soybeans, iron, zinc, calcium and vitamins — to hundreds of thousands of poor rural infants between 6 months and 2 years old since 2012. But children aged between 2 and 6 are not covered.
However, a new plan approved by the central government in November might help.
Its benefits include everything from prenatal care to effective and affordable education.
“It means the government’s sponsored nutrition programs can help more kids, including preschoolers, in the future,” said Liu Bei, a project officer with the China Development Research Foundation, a nonprofit government agency.
“Everybody says children are the future. So more money should be invested in them,” said Chang Suying, a nutrition specialist with the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF).
The nutrition programs will help with children’s health and brain development, while alleviating poverty and building the economy, she said.
UNICEF is exploring plans for future projects that focus on the first 1,000 days of life, from conception through the first two years — a crucial period that is linked to child development, Chang said.
China intends to lower the prevalence of stunting, underweight and anemia among the under 5s in poor rural areas to 10 percent, 5 percent and 12 percent, respectively, by 2020.
Before that, there needs to be improved program supervision on local governments to guarantee proper spending of central government subsidies, said Liu Bei, who added that food safety should also be guaranteed.
“I dream of growing up quickly and when I go to primary school, I can have a free lunch,” said Mai Xiaoying.
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