Nutrition and Development Week targets ensuring food security
Ensuring food security and rural development to create the foundation for sustainable malnutrition reduction is the message of the ongoing Nutrition and Development Week.
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Launched by the Ministry of Health from October 16-23, the campaign aims to materialise the National Nutrition Strategy for 2011-2020 and respond to World Food Day (October 16).
The drive will focus on encouraging people to develop the garden-pond-livestock pen (VAC) model in order to have safe food and improved living standards, while coordinating with the agricultural sector to employ solutions to ensure food security for households.
Localities will also join hands to raise public awareness of balanced and nutritional intake at home, contributing to improving wellness and physique of Vietnamese people.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimated that during 2010-2012, 852 million people in developing countries or around 15% of the global population suffered from chronic undernourishment.
UN agencies also revealed that in 2016, about 159 million under-five-year-old children were stunted and 50 million others were wasted. In the year, micro-nutrition deficiency conditions were spread among 2 billion people globally.
Despite being one of the world’s biggest rice exporters, with about 5.7 million tonnes expected to be shipped abroad in 2017, up 800,000 tonnes from 2016, there remain problems in the country regarding food security in households, especially those in climate change-affected areas, food hygiene and safety, as well as food production, stockpile and distribution.
Therefore, food security plays an important role in talking hunger and reducing malnutrition rate in Vietnam.
