UNITED NATIONS CHILDREN'S FUND (UNICEF) - FONDS DES NATIONS UNIES POUR L'ENFANCE - FONDO DE LAS NACIONES UNIDAS PARA LA INFANCIA

Ms. Carol Bellamy, Executive Director, United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF)

I am delighted to have this opportunity to address an issue at the core of UNICEF's mission. UNICEF has been involved in efforts to prevent and to reduce malnutrition since its inception 50 years ago. In the process, we have gained considerable experience and insights that I would like to share briefly with you today. However, I too, as many others, would like to briefly address the immediate and severe emergency issue in the Great Lakes region where, as so often is the case, women and children are the first victims. It unfortunately gives us a tragic context to the importance of Commitment 5 in the Plan of Action. Let me inform you that UNICEF and other United Nations agencies have undertaken a joint mission to seek channels for rapid distribution of emergency supplies, including food and medicines, which are aimed at combatting hunger and malnutrition among refugees and among the many displaced.

On behalf of the women and children who are particularly in jeopardy, we challenge you as representatives of governments to act speedily, forcefully and concertedly in assisting the involved agencies with the necessary support. In this respect, UNICEF strongly commends the initiative announced by the Government of Canada.

Not only in cases of emergency, but throughout most and much of the world, malnutrition remains an impediment to development. Indeed, it violates the human rights of approximately 850 million people - nearly one-sixth of the world's population do not have enough food to meet their basic needs. Micro-malnutrition undermines the health and intelligence of millions of others - two billion people, just in the case of iron deficiency. A third of the world's children are malnourished and malnutritioned - that has a hand in up to 12 million child deaths every year. We hope that this conference will contribute to putting an end to this unacceptable situation.

At this meeting you will hear, and you have heard much, about the prospects for increased food security but we must ask ourselves, does food security by itself ensure adequate nutrition. What does food security actually mean for children and their families. Why do we continue to see malnutrition even in households that are food secure?

For many families food security involves the physical burden of cultivating and harvesting food, storing it safely, preparing it, including securing adequate water and fuel, and selling or trading it to meet other food and livelihood needs. In most developing countries, the bulk of these tasks fall on women. They take on this work in addition to the many other tasks that they have traditionally assigned to them, even in countries where they have no legal right to own the land on which they labour.

But women are not only the guardians of family food security. They are also key agents in the prevention and reduction of child malnutrition. They generally have the exclusive responsibility to meet the special feeding needs of young children to ensure that children have access to vaccinations and other basic health care and to ensure household sanitation and cleanliness, and in a physiological sense, their nutritional status is the foundation of nutrition for their children. Women who are anaemic, who are stunted, who are underweight are likely to give birth to children who begin life with poor nutrition thus perpetuating throughout generations the cycle of poor development, increased vulnerability to disease and diminished performance.

What do these essential roles of women mean for our strategies to ensure food security? They mean that protecting the rights and improving the health and nutrition of women are just as important as improved agricultural technology or trade. Clearly, increasing the availability of food is essential, but gains in food production and distribution that come at the expense of harder labour for women, or of reducing their time or capacity to care for children, are made at too high a price. They can lead to greater levels of malnutrition in spite of improved food security. That is why we urge that one links strategies from improving food production and distribution to those that strengthen family nutrition, family health, and family care with women as key players throughout.

Last month the Secretary-General of the United Nations issued his report on progress at mid-decade on follow-up to the 1990 World Summit on Children. He reported considerable and widespread progress and I quote, "but he warned that there had been" ... and I quote again ... "little or no improvement in child malnutrition". He called for a re-commitment to the year 2000 goals for children: more integrated development strategies, broader partnerships and social and economic empowerment of the poor as keys to success.

With this broad vision, UNICEF looks forward to being part of the follow-up to this Summit in ways that we believe are essential. Let me mention a couple:

· We must continue and intensify our support to countries in pursuit of the year 2000 goal of halving child malnutrition, building on the momentum that is already underway to eliminate Vitamin A and iodine deficiencies;

· We must work to improve adolescent and women's health and nutrition, including anaemia, before the first pregnancy as well as during pregnancy and during lactation;

· We must all continue to advocate the ratification and enforcement of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and as well the Convention to end all forms of discrimination against women;

· We must ensure that the right to food moves from rhetoric to reality, and we must strengthen our efforts to promote, protect and support breastfeeding and adequate complementary feeding including support for lactating women in the workplace, as well as in the community. UNICEF will continue to give high priority to encouraging adherence to the International Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes;

· And lastly, UNICEF supports including indicators of children's and women's social, economic and health status in the food insecurity information systems that will be developed as a follow-up to this gathering.

We hope at UNICEF that one of the results of this Summit will be greater awareness of the importance of the empowerment of women and children in the struggle against hunger and malnutrition. UNICEF looks forward to contributing to meeting the global challenge that this awareness will bring.