Despite strong GDP growth, underweight stunted children in our midst

Mar 09, 2018

By Anil Netto
About two decades ago, at a press conference after a food security conference in Penang, I asked the then Health Minister about some statistics that I had come across that showed that a quarter of children in Malaysia were underweight.

The minister was taken aback; he looked incredulous and said something to the effect that he found it hard to believe such figures.

To be frank, I, myself, found it hard to believe that so many children could be underweight in our land when the country was consistently recording steady growth. After all, few in our urban areas really looked underweight – or so it seemed.
But there it was: the 1996 Human Development Report revealed that 25 per cent of Malaysian children under five were underweight from 1985 to 1995.

Twenty-five per cent? Perhaps maybe many of them were in urban pioneer settlements, plantation communities and deep in the interior areas. That said, I did see for myself how households in an urban pioneer settlement in Penang in the late 1990s were skimping on food. Children would have biscuits and black coffee, if at all, before trooping off to school.

Two decades on, fresh figures have emerged about underweight or stunted children: A new study by Unicef released last month found higher levels of poverty and malnutrition in a low-cost housing area in KL compared to the national average.

This affects their education and makes them more prone to malnourishment, Unicef said.

The report revealed 100 per cent “relative poverty amongst children living in low-cost flats in the nation’s capital.”

Among the major findings of the study:

-- 99.7 per cent of children in low-cost flats live in relative poverty, seven percent in absolute poverty
-- 15 per cent of children below the age of five are underweight, almost twice as high compared to the KL average of eight per cent
-- 22 per cent of the children are stunted, twice as high as the KL average
-- 23 per cent of the children are either overweight or obese, six times higher than the KL average of four per cent
-- While almost all the children are in school, only half of five to six-year-olds attend pre-school, compared to 92 per cent nationally in 2015
-- About 1 in 3 households has no reading materials for children
-- About 4 in 10 households have no toys for the children below 5

These are grim figures. Unicef highlighted something else. “The reality is: poor children are among us but they often remain unseen. It’s clearly a data blind spot,” said Marianne Clark-Hattingh, the Unicef representative in Malaysia.

This blind spot helps to explain why many middle class Malaysians, not to mention the elite, do not see this as a major problem. They really don’t know what low-income Malaysian children have for their meals.

And that’s just the chidren. The other day I spotted a security guard eating nasi lemak for breakfast.

I asked him if he ate that every day.

“Yes, it costs just one ringgit something. That’s all I can afford,” he said in Malay. “If I eat outside, I would have to pay up to four or five ringgit for breakfast.”

Clearly we have an invisible problem in our hands. Out of sight, out of mind?

In a way, it also reflects the divide between the rich and the poor and the failure of trickle-down economics. All those mega projects and robust GDP growth figures are clearly not trickling down to the ground adequately to provide decent meals for these children in low-cost flats.

This is also why the Bishop of Rome tells us the Church has to act as a field hospital. The poor are not going to come to us. We have to seek them out and see what can be done within our capacity, especially to empower them through education and skills training – which some Christians to their credit are doing in their own unsung way, voluntarily teaching children in remedial classes.

As we go through Lent, let us reflect if we have become the church of the middle-class and the well off, as Cardinal Soter Fernandez fears. How many of our Church fundraising projects really consider the needs of children like those in the Unicef study?

Some of these children could very well be attending our Church services, but chances are, if they cannot afford proper food at home, what is the likelihood that they will be able to afford transport to attend Sunday services in Church?