THE propaganda message, scrawled in white paint on the side of a wood-frame house, could hardly be more blunt: “Cure stupidity, cure poverty”. The cure for both, in one of China’s poorest counties, seems to be a daily nutritional supplement for children. At a pre-school centre in Songjia, as in more than 600 other poor villages across China, children aged three to six gather to get the stuff with their lunch. If China is to narrow its urban-rural divide, thousands more villages will need to do this much, or more. Widespread malnutrition still threatens to hold back a generation of rural Chinese.
China used to have more undernourished people than anywhere in the world except India: about 300m, or 30% of the population in 1980. Economic growth has pulled half of them out of poverty and hunger. But that still leaves about 150m, mainly in the countryside. Out of 88m children aged six to 15 in the poorest rural areas, around a third suffer from anaemia because of a lack of iron, according to survey data. Iron deficiency can stunt brain development, meaning many of these children will grow up ill-equipped to better their lot. “They are far behind compared with urban kids,” says Lu Mai, secretary-general of China Development Research Foundation (CDRF), a government-run charity. Mr Lu and other experts have been prodding the government to do more. The state subsidises school lunches for 23m children in the 680 poorest counties, as well as nutritional supplements for hundreds of thousands of babies. It is not enough.
Even where children get the calories they need—as most do in rural China—they are not being fed the right things. In one study of 1,800 infants in rural Shaanxi province in China’s north-west, 49% were anaemic and 40% were significantly hampered in developing either cognitive or motor skills. Fewer than one in ten were stunted or wasting, meaning that in most cases the problem was not lack of calories, but lack of nutrients.
China shares this affliction with much of the developing world. But it has the resources to respond. Parents have the means to feed their babies properly. And with a relatively modest investment, the government could do a better job of improving childhood nutrition. The difficulties lie in educating parents—and officials.
“Babies are probably 50% malnourished” in poor rural areas, says Scott Rozelle, co-director of the Rural Education Action Programme (REAP), a research outfit at Stanford University which has done extensive tests on anaemia in rural China. “But almost no mums are malnourished.” Mr Rozelle says that in one of his surveys rural mothers showed a better understanding of how to feed pigs than babies: 71% said pigs need micronutrients, whereas only 20% said babies need them.
Mr Lu’s charity and REAP argue that a nutritional supplement called ying yang bao should be available to rural mothers. A powdery concoction of soyabeans, iron, zinc, calcium and vitamins, it is supposed to be sprinkled on food once a day. Each packet costs less than one yuan (16 cents) to produce and one yuan to distribute, paid by the government.
Trials conducted since 2006 have consistently shown that ying yang bao reduces anaemia and improves growth and development in infants and toddlers. But persuading parents of this (or grandparents, if the parents are off working in cities) has not been easy. About half give up feeding it to their children. “Poor people feel very suspicious”, Mr Lu says. They wonder if free supplements are unsafe, or fake. “Then they worry will we charge later?”
This may be the legacy in rural China of years of seeing government invest little—and often charge a lot—for basic services. Moreover, at the local level the workers who are meant to help mothers may well be family-planning officials responsible for controlling population, a role that hardly inspires trust.
At higher levels of government, too, officials need a lot of persuading that nutrition programmes are not a waste of public money. In 2011 China began instituting a programme similar to America’s federal school-lunch programme for the poor, at a cost of 16 billion yuan ($2.6 billion) a year. But one assessment suggests that perhaps half the schools are providing substandard, uncooked meals, partly because some local governments refuse to foot the bill for kitchens and cooks.
via Malnutrition: The hungry and forgotten | The Economist.
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