About half a million Batswana are undernourished as they do not have access to adequate amounts of food, a UN agency has said.The Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) 2009 report indicates that many Batswana do not get the quality of food they need to be in a healthy state of mind and body. The report entitled ‘The state of food Insecurity in the World’ was released last week. It said that 500,000 people in Botswana, which translates to over a quarter of 1.8 million population, are hungry.
The report which uses the words hunger and undernourishment interchangeably defines a person with no food security as one who does not have the physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets his or her dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.
Undernourishment on the other hand is said to exist when caloric intake is below the Minimum Dietary Energy Requirement (MDER). The MDER is the amount of energy needed for light activity and a minimum acceptable weight for attained height. It varies by country and from year to year depending on the gender and age structure of the population.
Although the report uses data from the period up to 2006, which was before the food and financial crises, it paints a gloomy picture of the country’s health status which does not compare favourably with others in the region.
Lesotho, with a population of two million, has 300,000 people who are undernourished, while Mauritius only has 100,000 hungry people from a population of 1.2 million. Namibia on the other hand is said to have 400,000 hungry people translating to 19 percent of the population.
In southern Africa only Zambia, Zimbabwe and Angola are said to be in a worse hunger situation than Botswana.
The report places countries into categories which range from one to five. Category one is the best case scenario in which only one sub-Saharan country, Gabon is found.
Botswana is in category four along with countries such as Malawi, Kenya, Congo, Senegal, Gambia and war torn Sudan which has 20 percent of its population undernourished. FAO estimates that about 1.02 billion people – about 100 million people more than last year – are undernourished in 2009, the highest number in four decades.
“The rising number of hungry people is intolerable,” said FAO director-general Jacques Diouf as the new annual report on world hunger was released. “We have the economic and technical means to make hunger disappear, what is missing is a stronger political will to eradicate hunger forever,” he said. The increase in the number of hungry people is not a result of poor harvests but is due to high food prices – particularly in developing countries – lower incomes and lost jobs.
Even before the recent twin crises of food and recession, the number of undernourished people had risen steadily for a decade, reversing progress made in the 1980s and early 1990s.
The FAO report comes barely two weeks after another UN report revealed that about half of Botswana’s population is living in poverty. This is despite the fact that Botswana is a middle income economy.
The 2009 Human Development Index (HDI) report released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) shows that Botswana, with a $13, 000 Gross Domestic Product(GDP) per capita, the highest in Africa, has managed to reduce the number of people living under $2 a day from 55 percent to 49 percent, although the country continues to fare poorly in human development. South Africa has 42 percent of its population living under $2 a day while Namibia is at 62 percent.
Mmegi Online
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