Malnutrition Policies, Essay Example

Malnutrition is perhaps one of the greatest problems facing young infants in the modern world today.  According to sources, “Malnutrition is directly responsible for 300,000 deaths per year in children younger than 5 years in developing countries and contributes indirectly to over half the deaths in childhood worldwide” (eMedicine.com, 2009).  Because this statistic is very striking, it is important for many policies to be enacted in order to eliminate and reduce the overall death toll and other damages that malnutrition can inflict upon young children.

Population growth shows very little sign of slowing, and it should continue to be a problem as many countries around the world fail to have any real form of population control.  A strict population control policy by countries like China would restrict families to have only one or two children per household.  This type of effort may begin to slow the population growth rate enough to allow the resources to catch up.  Secondly, governments absolutely must begin a long-term investment effort into ensuring the quality of agriculture and the food industries are able to thrive in the coming years.  Such an effort would involve costly investments in the sum of millions of dollars, perhaps even upwards of one billion dollars over the long term in order to keep farmers producing quality crops that can be shipped around the world.  Because not all countries are able to provide self-sustaining food supplies, an aggregate effort by international organizations like the W.H.O. would help create agreements whereby countries help out those less fortunate civilizations.

Overall, these policies would definitely have an impact on the economy.  First of all, the additional costs for each country to invest in agriculture and food industries would likely be more than many countries can afford to appropriately lower the malnutrition rate.  However, policies such as the W.H.O. cooperation agreement would have very little impact on the national economies except for the positive or negative effects caused by importing and exporting.  Either way, the goal must remain that policies be devised to reduce this horrible impact that malnutrition causes to thousands of families every year.

References

Rosegrant, M.W., & Meijer, S. (2002). Appropriate food policies and investments could reduce child malnutrition by 43% in 2020. The Journal of Nutrition, 132, 3437-3440.

Shashidhar, H.R. (2009, April 9). Malnutrition. Retrieved from http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/985140-overview