India and Food

NYT --- Mr. Mehta said that if Americans slimmed down to the weight of middle-class Indians, "many hungry people in sub-Saharan Africa would find food on their plates." He added, archly, that the money spent in the United States on liposuction to get rid of fat from excess consumption could be funneled to feed famine victims.

Contrast the above NYT article with the BBC front-page news about under-nourished kids in India.

A malnourished child in Delhi

[BBC] More than 1.5m children in India are at risk of becoming malnourished because of rising global food prices, the UN children's charity, Unicef, says. It warns that food inflation could be devastating for vulnerable women and children right across South Asia.The region already has the largest number of malnourished children in the world and levels could get even worse.

Also very sad statement by P Sainath on where India is today. [article]
No minister came forward to calm the nation when India hit 94th rank in the Global Hunger Index. That's out of 118 countries. The daily, DNA, though, did capture the essence of the story with its report: Ethiopians manage hunger better than us. For indeed, they do these days. At least in their score on the GHI Progress Indicator of the International Food Policy Research Institute. Ethiopia worked better at reducing hunger than we did even though worse off in overall ranking. Zimbabwe, facing hyperinflation and worse, still ranks ahead of us at slot 93 in the GHI itself. Gabon, Honduras and Bolivia are also all ahead of us in that list. Pakistan too, is ahead of us in the GHI, at 88. China logs in at 47. All our south asian neighbours do better than us on this index, except Bangladesh. And who knows when they'll overtake us? Even Nepal, one of the poorest countries in Asia, outranks us. None of them boasts an economy growing at 9 per cent a year.