'Nepalis eating healthy food'

KATHMANDU, January 20: Nepal may not be one of the best places to eat on earth, but the situation here is better than that in other South Asian countries like India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, a latest report shows.

The Good Enough to Eat Index prepared by Oxfam, an international non-government organisation, has placed Nepal in 91st position among 125 countries, with a score of 32. Nepal’s position in the index is higher than those of India and Pakistan at 97th, and Bangladesh at 102nd.

The index was prepared by evaluating whether people get enough to eat, whether people can afford food prices, quality of food being consumed and the effect of consumed food on people’s health.

The report shows that around 30 per cent of children in Nepal are underweight, while around 16 per cent of the people are undernourished. As a result, Nepal secured a score of 64 in the ‘underweight children’ category and score of 19 in ‘undernourishment’ category. The index has used standard minimum/maximum rescaling method, where zero point — the minimum score — is best and 100 points — the maximum score — is the worst.

One of the reasons for higher incidence of underweight children and undernourishment is high food prices, in which Nepal has obtained a score of 42.

“High food prices impose a massive human cost on the world’s poorest, who spend up to 75 per cent of their income on food,” says the report.

Yet, a good news is that food inflation volatility is pretty low, as the country has secured a score of 13 in the category.

Another good news is that 87.6 per cent of the country’s population has access to safe and clean water. However, there is very little diversity in diet consumed by Nepalis, as around 72 per cent of the people consume similar food products almost everyday.

Despite very little food diversity, whatever being consumed by Nepalis is healthy, says the report, as only 8.4 per cent of the population suffer from diabetes and a mere 1.4 per cent of the population suffer from obesity.

“Obesity is a growing challenge in the fight to ensure that everybody is able to eat healthily with more than a billion people now overweight or obese. This figure illustrates a broken global food system, in which consumers suffer from both under nutrition and obesity — often in the same countries or communities. It is clear that governments and the food industry need to address this,” says the report.

To fix the broken food system, the report recommends that countries invest in small-holder agriculture and infrastructure to raise production levels and diversity of crops, and give farmers access to markets and the means to store food to prevent waste.

The report also suggests better regulation of markets to help prevent high and volatile food prices.

Top five countries and score

Netherlands 6

France 8

Switzerland 8

Denmark 10

Sweden 10

(Source: THT)