Kenya among states behind global targets on food and nutrition

Kenya is among countries vulnerable to increases in international food prices and is lagging behind on global food and health targets, a new World Bank report shows.

The Global Monitoring Report 2012:Food Prices, Nutrition, and the Millennium Development Goals report shows that although the Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has achieved more than 60 per cent of the progress required on goals such as gender parity, primary school completion, access to safe water and extreme poverty, health-related MDGs, particularly maternal mortality, require urgent attention.

The report says that in most of the countries approximately 50-70 per cent of household spending is devoted to food and that the region imports about 45 per cent of its consumption of rice and 85 per cent of its consumption of wheat.

This has led to high levels of malnutrition with 38 per cent of children being stunted.

“The situation is most perilous in the drought and conflict-stricken countries of the Horn of Africa. Nevertheless, increases in cereal production driven by higher yields since the middle of the last decade improved the continent’s ability to cope with the food price spike of 2011, compared to the experience in 2008,” reads the report in part.

“The food price spikes in 2008 and 2011 have prevented millions of people from escaping poverty because the poor spend large shares of their incomes on food,” reads the report released on Friday in part.

The report says higher food prices have increased undernourishment thus progress towards MDGs closely linked to food and nutrition is lagging; particularly child mortality (MDG 4) and maternal mortality (MDG 5), with 105 countries of the 144 monitored not expected to reach MDG 4, and 94 off track on MDG 5.

According to the report urban, non-farm, and female headed households are affected the most in the short term by higher food prices and the food price spike of 2007/08 is estimated to have raised the poverty headcount by 95.6 million, and that of 2010/11 by 36 million people.

But all is not gloom. The report indicates that the region has made progress in other MDGs. For instance, between 1990 and 2009 the primary completion rate in SSA has improved by more than 1.5 times with respect to all developing countries.