Hey, I guess democracy is not the only solution to humanity. China Surpasses U.N. Goal to Beat Child Hunger http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/03/world/asia/02cnd-hunger.html By SHARON LaFRANIERE Published: May 3, 2006 JOHANNESBURG, May 2 — China has made huge strides in reducing malnutrition among children over the past 15 years, while India recorded only modest progress, and eastern and southern Africa made no gains at all, according to a new report by the United Nations Children's Fund. More than one in four children in the developing world are undernourished, Unicef said, a decline of just five percentage points since 1990. At that rate, officials said, the world will not meet the United Nations target of halving the number of undernourished children by 2015. "This is unbelievably slow progress and far less than what is needed to meet the goals," Rainer Gross, chief of nutrition for the children's agency, said in a telephone briefing from New York. The report "should be a wake- up call to the world. We are far off course," he said. Health experts estimate that malnutrition contributes to more than half of the 11 million deaths of children under 5 every year. The United Nations report focused mainly on children under the age of five who are underweight, one indicator of malnutrition. China has surpassed the United Nations' goal for 2015, halving its percentage of underweight children and reducing the rate of death among children under age 5 by more than one-third, the report shows. In India, on the other hand, the share of children who are undernourished dropped by only 6 percentage points since 1990, leaving a staggering 47 percent of children under 5 underweight, the report said. Together, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan account for half of the world's underweight children, the report said. "South Asia is the worst performing region," said Dr. Gross. "Children in this region are living in an almost constant state of emergency." In southern and eastern Africa, nearly 30 percent of children are underweight, just as in 1990, according to the report. Officials blamed the AIDS pandemic, increasing poverty and declines in agricultural productivity, among other factors. Dr. Gross said the main cause of malnutrition is not food shortages, but poor diets with too few vitamins and minerals. At a news conference in Johannesburg, Jay Naidoo, chairman of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, a nonprofit group based in Geneva, proposed that the staples of poor families' diets, such as corn or wheat flour, be routinely fortified with vitamins to improve nutrition — just as salt is iodized to limit iodine deficiencies. "The most cost-effective intervention is to fortify the basic foods that people consume," Mr. Naidoo said.
Cause they suck! No, in seriousness the only comparable country mentioned is India. I don't recall seeing to many KFC's in India, I don't think they have enough Veg. options for it to be too successful. I try to stay away from western FF when abroad, but as a cultural experience sometimes it's fun to see the foreign spin on it. Some of those KFC's in china, though - Wow, they were gargantuan, and very popular.
Definately something Chinese government can be proud of. They need alot more than luck to get in the world cup.
this is definately a good thing, but in light of all of china's human rights abuses i am not all that impressed.
China's one child policy probably gives them a bit of a competitive advantge over India in this metric. When you are having fewer and fewer children under 5, it is easier to feed a higher percentage of them. China has myriad other problems to worry about, the lack of liberty given to it's people at the root of many of them.
Reducing hunger in the world's most populous country is a huge acheivement. Just like similar efforts to raise the poverty level.
American's throw away more than 150 pounds of food every year. Our waste food could alleviate world hunger. We're terrible in this regard.
Free markets by themselves suck for eliminating hunger. Good for China. In our own country forrtunately we had the Food Stamp Program in the 1960's which helped a lot with the people who did not have the money to purchase food on the free market.
