Climate change will leave 5mn Indian children malnourished

Rise in food prices by over 1.5 times owing to climate change will leave five million Indian children malnourished by 2020, says a study by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, a conglomeration of agri-research bodies, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Dec 12, 2009, 01:07:21 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, Copenhagen

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Rise in food prices by over 1.5 times owing to climate change will leave five million Indian children malnourished by 2020, says a study by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), a conglomeration of agri-research bodies.

“Climate change will give India an additional five million malnourished children under the age of five,” said Gerald Nelson, head of the International Food Policy Research Institute, a global food policy research body.

This will lead to an increase in calorie deficiency by 20 per cent per capita, checkmating India’s bid to eradicate
malnutrition by 2050.

Close to 46 per cent of India’s children under five years of age are malnourished. The figure has gone down by just one per cent in the last decade.

The problem is more acute in the rich agriculture belts of Gangetic plains in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal, which, the report says, would be among the worst hit by climate change.

Agreeing with most findings of the report, Planning Commission member in-charge of agriculture Abhijit Sen said the country needs a policy for adaptation in the agriculture sector.

In the absence of such a policy, the country’s food security will be at risk, Sen said.

“Prices of food are rising and if climate change accelerates the pace of the price-increase, each of our poverty alleviation programmes would be hit.”

Establishing a link between a drop in agriculture production by 10-40 per cent to increase in food prices and rising malnutrition, Nelson, quoting the report, said that close to 20 per cent of the additional malnourished children in the world would be in India.

The fall in agriculture production will also lead to a fall of 20 per cent per capita calorie availability in South Asia. At present, the per capita calorie availability is 2,424, the second lowest after Sub-Saharan Africa. It would fall to 2,226 in next 10-12 years because of climate change, Nelson said.

India’s calorie intake is about 30 per cent less than that of the average of developed countries and 10 per cent of the developing nations.

Still, India will be relatively better off than Sub-Saharan Africa, the worst hit owing to climate change.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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