Nepal improves hunger position
The Global Hunger Index (GHI) indicates that Nepal has improved its hunger position than yester years shifting it to serious from the alarming hunger situation in the country.
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The Global Hunger Index 2011 Report prepared by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) has placed Nepal in the 54th position, up from 56 in 2010.
Nepal is one of 16 countries that have moved up from alarming to serious in the GHI. Nepal has been put in a position of serious in persistent hunger based on data which shows 16 percent of the population to be undernourished, 38.8 percent of under-five children to be underweight and 4.8 percent of them dying before they reach five years of age.
Among South Asian countries, Nepal has fared better than Pakistan, India and Bangladesh in the GHI. Nepal is one of those countries where hunger has decreased in the range of 25-50 percent in the last two decades.
The GHI report shows that Nepal and Sri Lanka in South Asia including 14 other countries moved from alarming to serious in persistent hunger while India and Bangladesh including eight other countries moved from extremely alarming to alarming hunger situation in 2011.
However, the data for undernourishment is from 2005-07, prevalence of underweight children is from 2004-09 and under-five mortality rate is from 2009. Therefore, government officials denied that the food security scenario in the country was as serious as shown by the GHI.
According to the Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives (MoAC), the GHI has not taken account of the food situation from 2009 to 2011.
The MoAC has projected a higher food reserve in 2010-11 after two straight years of deficit. Nepal’s food reserve increased to 443,057 tonnes. The country had a food deficit of 330,000 tonnes and 132,000 tonnes in fiscal years 2009-10 and 2008-09 respectively.
Nepal has been importing food since 2005.
The GHI says that since 1990, 19 countries have moved out of the bottom two categories, alarming and extremely alarming, and 10 out of the bottom. In the 2011 GHI, 26 countries remain in the two most severe GHI hunger categories, compared to 43 in the 1990 GHI.
