Malnutrition Aspirin: Climate Change and Food Insecurity

Delso Khossa"

Aspirin is a type of pill that works to relieve pain and fever. The pill has generic properties to alleviate symptoms in the human body, not to cure. Managing foods to fill your stomach is not enough, you need to know the information about the food groups (protective, energetic and constructive) and micronutrients such as iron, vitamins A, B12, C, D and K, iodine, copper, zinc and others that the body needs, especially for pregnant women, babies and elderly people. The imbalance of micronutrients in the body becomes the effect of aspirin. Malnutrition or undernutrition resulting from micronutrient deficiencies or even hunger, i.e., obese people are among the malnourished individuals. The absence and presence of food can cause malnutrition, however, children who suffer from chronic and acute malnutrition are seen as poor class human beings influenced by low income factors, the effects of climate change, little knowledge about nutrition, wars and inefficiencies of public policies or poor governance. The issue of lack of knowledge about nutrition affects the lower and middle classes. The latter class is able to ensure basic needs and certain desires and has access to information, but rarely transforms information into preventive actions against malnutrition. Although the problem is comprehensive, the focus of analysis is the poor class that hardly ensures basic needs such as food, education, health, adequate housing, sanitation and drinking water, access to information, the right to freedom, gender, security, etc. World Bank data, published on its blog in 2022, shows that in East and Southern Africa, around 656 million citizens, the majority of whom are poor, face difficulties in accessing adequate, nutritious and safe food. Countries such as Ethiopia and Madagascar have 22.7 million and 7.8 million people respectively facing cross-cutting challenges such as the effects of climate change. The sub-Saharan African continent faces three challenges (i) climate shocks and food systems accelerated by the lack of investment in resilience in infrastructure; (ii) global price shocks influenced by the increase in the price of energy, fertilizers and the war between Ukraine and Russia; undernutrition influenced by food security (hunger and widespread shortages) and poor impactful health outcomes. While the UNICEF report (2024) reveals that child food poverty is the result of family poverty. Families have difficulty in ensuring adequate nutrition for children to achieve the SDG targets such as “End hunger, achieve food security, improve nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture”, an attempt is made to provide guidance for national policies. Child food poverty negatively affects the early days of childhood, as it lacks basic nutrients, causing problems with child survival, physical growth (low performance in working age) and cognitive development (lower school performance). The report classifies child malnutrition as follows: children who eat zero to two types of food groups per day live in the stage of severe child food poverty; children who eat 3-4 types of food groups per day live in the stage of moderate child food poverty; children who get more than 5 types of food groups are outside the child food poverty line. Of the 134 countries analyzed, it concluded that 440 million children under the age of 5 live in child food poverty, of which only 181 million of the 440 million are in a situation of severe child food poverty. In terms of geographical location, the South Asia region leads with 130 million; followed by West and Central Africa with 73 million; Southern and Eastern Africa with 72 million; East Asia and the Pacific with 59 million; Middle East and North Africa with 30 million and Latin America and the Caribbean with 18 million. The Asian continent is the most affected by child food poverty, followed by Africa. In the Mozambican government context, the Healthy Eating, Physical Activity and Health Strategy II was approved for the years 2019-2023, with the aim of promoting the consumption of breastfeeding to reduce child malnutrition. The Strategic Education Plan for Education 2020-2029 was also approved, which has as its objectives school feeding and instruction in nutrition content. In addition, other government sectors support the cause for the approval and implementation of public policies. Last year, the Food and Nutrition Security Policy and Strategy for its Implementation (2024-2030) were approved, a crucial instrument for improving food security. However, the instruments require priority, inclusive, transparent actions and accountability of key and complementary sectors. The mobilisation of resources cannot be seen as a means of influencing changes in public health, but as a means of eradicating the problem, which means there must be will and empathy with the situation and good management. The UNICEF report (2023) maps the consequences of malnourished girls and women in childhood. At school and working age, women have low participation in the economy, because the struggle is to ensure basic nutrition services, to prevent forms of malnutrition. The consequences such as malnutrition, micronutrient deficiency and anemia increase gender issues, weak immunity to infections and the risk of complications during pregnancy and childbirth. This situation is due to (i) the nutritional system for girls is very slow and continues to be threatened, with more than 1 billion adolescents and women suffering from malnutrition; (ii) in poor regions, adolescents and women are affected by malnutrition and anemia, for example, Sub-Saharan Africa covers 68% of underweight adolescents and women; (iii) malnutrition affects generations, for example, maternal short stature and low birth weight, which results in delayed growth and wasting in early childhood, resulting in child malnutrition with an estimated 73% of all babies born with low birth weight and 74% suffering from stunted growth in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia; (iv) global food insecurity generates a nutritional crisis for girls and women, from 2019 (49 million) to 2021 (126 million), which means between 4 and 5 pregnant and lactating women were in a situation of food insecurity. The complexity of the factors that contribute to malnutrition poses challenges for the management of public policies and the transmission of information to vulnerable classes about the occurrence of food insecurity. Factors such as rising fuel prices, wars, price fluctuations, climate change, technological centralization, inefficiency of basic services, lack of information and a cross-cutting gender problem generate an acute crisis of food insecurity at the global, regional and country levels. Therefore, there is undoubtedly an urgent need to expand risk communication strategies to transmit technological knowledge and minimize the harmful impact on women's health and on humanity. The media industry needs to see the humanitarian crisis of malnutrition in families as an obstacle to sharing preventive information. Developing countries urgently need to design and implement priority actions such as combating malnutrition in families, rather than just talking about it to fill the media space. There should be more action than talk; for example, agrarian policies should be seen as a lever for development and also to boost the economy or industrialization, without neglecting the construction of resilient infrastructure to face climate change. There is also an urgent need to expand the technology chain with the private sector and universities to transform the knowledge produced into actions, through an incentive in the form of tax exemptions for those who wish to invest in the agriculture and livestock sector. These policies can reduce the effects of food insecurity.

2025/12/3