Seminars probe malnutrition causes
JAKARTA (JP): Lack of awareness of proper dietary needs and poverty were both blamed as causes for the estimated seven million Indonesian children suffering from malnutrition.
Experts in two separate seminars on child nutrition highlighted the forgotten factor of education and awareness in the problem of malnutrition, which has mostly been blamed on people being too poor to feed themselves as a result of the monetary crisis.
Officials and experts admitted that the problem had been festering for sometime, and that the crisis has merely proved a trigger for widespread concern about malnutrition.
"Our children have been vulnerable to malnutrition since 1978. However, the general public have not realized that," the Coordinating Minister for People's Welfare and the Eradication of Poverty Haryono Suyono said during a seminar here on Monday.
Roy Tjiong, the Indonesian branch medical director of the Helen Keller foundation, an international non-governmental health organization, said ignorance about nutrition was the underlying cause of widespread malnutrition.
He claimed that an overlooked example of this was the erroneous perception that Indonesians are shorter than Americans.
He pointed out that on average Indonesian adults are 20 centimeters shorter than their American counterparts. However at school age, Indonesian children are on average about half a centimeter taller than American kids.
"We assume that's normal because we are Asian, when actually it's because we are malnourished," he asserted during the seminar here.
He remarked that many Indonesians often prefer to buy cigarettes rather then eggs for their children.
Data from a 1998 socioeconomic survey showed seven million Indonesian children were suffering from malnutrition, of which some 305,000 were not expected to reach the age of five.
The plight of Indonesia's poor has been aggravated by the severe economic crisis which hit the country in mid-1997.
The number of people living in poverty in the country is estimated to have doubled to almost 50 million last year.
As Roy pointed out in his example, the problem of malnutrition is often rooted in the lack of parents' awareness of the issue.
The 1998 survey showed that 4.3 million babies died immediately after labor. The main cause of this is believed to be a lack of nutrition while in pregnancy.
Endah Nurdiana, of the Voice of Concerned Mothers, further blamed cultural habits which were not conducive to bringing up a child in a nutritionally aware environment.
"The patriarchal culture in Indonesia, which puts the interests of the father as head of the family first, and 'appoints' the mother as the sole person responsible for the children's needs, only helps to foster ignorance," she said.
Endah also pointed out that malnutrition can also occur in educated middle class families in which both parents work.
"Working mothers often give their children junk food, which is expensive but not nutritious," she added.
Experts and officials concurred that to combat the problem both the government and the public must learn more about matters concerning nutrition.
The government's success in raising awareness about family planning could be an example on how to boost the nutrition awareness program.
During a separate seminar in Ujungpandang, South Sulawesi, Minister of Health Farid A. Moeloek warned of a lost generation if the nutritional levels of Indonesian children are not improved.
He warned that intellectual capacity was often related to nutrition and that Indonesian children might not be intelligent enough to compete in the global marketplace.
Moeloek said one immediate step could be to improve local health officials' knowledge so that they in turn can disseminate information on nutritious food to the people. (04)