Indian and Pakistani Hunger

India is a nation that prides itself on having been self-sufficient in food production for decades and having leaped forward economically over the past 20 years. India is a food surplus nation but according to the International Food Policy Research Institute’s 2011 Global Hunger Index, it ranks 67th out of 81 countries and has more than 200 million food-insecure people, the most in the world. So it isn’t surprising that hunger and starvation doesn’t fit neatly into the story of a “shining” India. Historically oppressed and disenfranchised lower castes and tribal populations – known as “scheduled castes” and “scheduled tribes” — are the poorest of the poor and the most at risk.

360 million people live under the official poverty line – more than any other country – and starvation is all too real. A government response to a starvation death requires public officials to admit that one happened. Again and again officials often are reluctant to make such an acknowledgement. When a poor person can’t access entitlements to government food and work programs local officials often find it convenient to attribute their death solely to a pre-existing disease. Sometimes the officials attribute those deaths to alcoholism or lifestyle choices. This isn’t always the case, of course – some officials are upfront about the fact that starvation deaths are a reality and have to be confronted. Trying to prove that someone died because of starvation is tricky in poor communities where a variety of health problems are prevalent. People commonly suffer from ongoing, untreated illnesses such as tuberculosis, malaria, and chronic fever. What is clear though, doctors say, is that a lack of access to food can greatly exaggerate and complicate other health problems and put people’s lives at risk.

Dr. John Butterly, executive director of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire and co-author of “Hunger: The Biology and Politics of Starvation,” says chronic malnutrition often leads to a compromised immune system and makes a person unable to fight off organisms “that a normally fed human would barely notice.”

In Bihar the under-five mortality rate for scheduled castes is 113 deaths per 1,000 births, compared to the state-wide average of 85 and the all-India average of 74.

In his book “Starvation and India’s Democracy,” a study of starvation deaths in Orissa and West Bengal, food security expert Dan Banik argued that those in authority “do not expect to be held accountable to persistently high levels of under-nutrition and are confident that such issues are accepted by society as a natural feature of a poor country with a large population.”

The situation in Pakistan is little different. With figures of malnutrition rising every year, 50% of Pakistan’s population remains food insecure, according to the UN World Food Program (WFP). Despite sufficient national food production to meet the needs of Pakistan’s 170 million people, according to WFP, some 83 million people, almost 50 per cent of the population, were food insecure by 2010

WFP representative and Country Director for Pakistan Jean Luc Siblot said a huge part of the population is malnourished and this needs to be given top priority. “People do not have access to food items which have the nutritional value to meet their requirements. This would lead to issues with biological and mental development of the people...The rate of malnutrition, especially amongst children and lactating mothers, is very alarming and something to worry about” Siblot explained