A lack of trained health staff, treatments and health promotion make Indonesia’s eastern province of Nusa Tenggara Timur (NTT) one of the country’s most food insecure, despite the general availability of food, reports IRINnews.
The country’s highest rates of under-five children who were diagnosed as chronically malnourished (as measured by height-for-age) or acutely malnourished was in NTT– 46.7 and 20 percent, respectively, as compared to the national average of 36.8 percent and 13.6 percent.
SULTPARADOKS STIKKER DYBERE END MAD
– Food is not the main problem here, said UN Food and Agriculture Organization food security officer, Andrey Damaledo.
– We have pumpkin, cassava, banana here.
Even rice and maize harvests have steadily increased from 2003 to 2007, according to the government’s most recent Food Security and Vulnerability Atlas, leading to surplus production in some districts.
Yet NTT hosted six of the country’s most vulnerable districts, second only to the far eastern province of Papua.
To create a composite food security index, researchers evaluated 14 factors nationwide, including female literacy; access to safe water, sanitation, electricity, road access and health facilities; exposure to natural disasters; deforestation and food production.
Overall malnutrition is a longstanding problem in NTT that is still being treated with short-term solutions, said Damaledo.
– Peanut pastes and rice giveaways do not address underlying problems of feeding practices, low levels of education, and cultural obstacles to good nutrition. There is a tree of causes we are still mapping, he said.
