Given the severe underfunding and wretched infrastructure in Iraq, this, too, could easily have been predicted.
Malnutrition among the youngest Iraqis has almost doubled since the U.S.-led invasion toppled President Saddam Hussein, a hunger specialist told the United Nations' human rights body Wednesday in a summary of previously reported studies on health in Iraq.
By last fall, 7.7 percent of Iraqi children under age 5 suffered acute malnutrition, compared to 4 percent after Hussein's ouster in April 2003, said Jean Ziegler, the UN Human Rights Commission's special expert on the right to food. [...] The situation facing Iraqi youngsters is "a result of the war led by coalition forces," said Ziegler, an outspoken Swiss sociology professor and former lawmaker.
Overall, more than a quarter of Iraqi children don't get enough to eat, Ziegler told the 53-nation commission, which is halfway through its annual six-week session. The U.S. delegation and other coalition countries declined to respond to his presentation. [...] Ziegler did not mention the role of Iraq's insurgency in the nutrition problem, something often cited by aid groups.
The lack of mention of the insurgency isn't surprising; after all, from that point of view, without the invasion, there would be no insurgency, and thus the aid groups wouldn't have any problems. (Of course, they wouldn't be there, either, and Iraqi children weren't particularly well nourished before the invasion; the entire thing is just a tangled mess.)
Apparently after the Freep went to press (it has, or had, a notoriously early deadline), the US did respond ... but in a most peculiar way.
The U.S. State Department says a U.N. report claiming malnutrition among Iraqi children had doubled is "open to doubts." [...] "These kinds of assessments are open to questions, open to doubts," State Department deputy spokesman Adam Ereli told a briefing in Washington. "Many of these assessments are based on pre-war statistics."
The United States, he said, was aware of the nutritional needs of the Iraqi people and, since May 2003, had vaccinated more than 3 million children under five along with 700,000 pregnant women.
He said the United States has provided supplementary doses of Vitamin A for more than 600,000 children under two and 1.5 million lactating mothers. Iron folate supplements were provided to more than 1.6 million women of childbearing age.
"We have screened more than 1.3 million children under five for malnutrition. We have distributed high-protein biscuits to more than 450,000 children and 200,000 pregnant and nursing mothers," Ereli added.
All of that is well and good, but it doesn't answer, even indirectly, the main thrust of the report which is that the Iraqi children are demostrably worse off relative to pre-war Iraq. It's perfectly silly and disingenuous to complain that the survey uses pre-war statistics when that's was, and was meant to be, the benchmark for comparison. And supplementary doses of specific vitamins and supplements will not suffice to deal with a comprehensive malnutrition issue.
I'm mildly surprised that someone in the government hasn't said, "Yo! According to recent stats, we've got one hell of a lot of hungry kids here, too. You don't see anyone complaining about that, do you? So just quit yer bitchin'." (Because that is the sort of ham-handed diplomacy at which this administration seems to excel, from time to time.)
Posted by iain at March 31, 2005 02:46 PM
