March 7 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The number of pregnant and lactating adolescents and adult women suffering from acute malnutrition has increased by 25 percent in the countries most affected by the current global food crisis, according to a new study by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) that warns of the risk to both mothers and newborns.
The report ‘Undernourished and forgotten: a global nutrition crisis for adolescent girls and women’ focuses on Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Chad, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Yemen , considered by UNICEF to be the epicenter of a crisis on a global scale that has been influenced in the last year by the outbreak of the war in Ukraine.
Experts conclude that more than 1 billion adolescent girls and women suffer from malnutrition, essential micronutrient deficiencies and anemia, with lifelong repercussions. In the case of pregnant women, poor nutrition increases the risk in pregnancy and childbirth, with collateral risks also in terms of growth and learning.
The UN estimates that 51 million children under the age of two are stunted. In half of the cases, this ballast derives from pregnancy or from the first six months of life, when it basically depends on breast milk.
By region, the southern zone of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa concentrate two out of three women with low weight and three out of five with anemia.
AN “URGENT” ACTION
Hunger shows a gender bias that is also increasing: in 2021 there were 126 million more women than men in a situation of food insecurity, thus widening the difference of 49 million existing in 2019.
The executive director of UNICEF, Catherine Russell, has warned that “when a girl or a woman does not receive adequate nutrition, gender inequality is perpetuated” and, to care for both these people and their babies, she has called for “political will “.
Thus, he has stressed that “there is no time to lose” to address the malnutrition of adolescents and adult women to prevent child malnutrition. Without “urgent action by the international community,” she has warned, “the consequences could last for generations.”
The study launches a battery of recommendations that include prioritizing women’s access to food, improving large-scale access to commonly consumed foods, free access to essential nutrition services in pregnancy and lactation, and eliminating discriminatory social norms such as child marriage, among other measures.
