The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Egypt celebrated on Wednesday the World Food Day by focusing on the healthy routine diet especially for children and women.
Under the title “Our Actions is our Future: Nutrition Diets to Eliminate Hunger in the World,” Nasredin Hag Alamin, FAO’s representative in Egypt, said that the problem in Egypt is more about a healthy diet rather than hunger or food security.
“Challenges facing Egypt require moving to more sustainable food systems and pumping more investment in the agriculture and nutrition projects,” Alamin told Xinhua.
He urged more spending on the researches of developing the agricultural supplies through enhancing innovation and boosting the sustainable production.
Official reports in 2019 revealed that the number of people suffering from malnutrition in the world is increasing, Alamin added, noting that nearly 820 million people worldwide couldn’t find sufficient food.
He pointed out that climate changes, and waste of resources because of some bad agricultural methods are behind swift minimized biological diversity to only nine groups of plants that represent 66 percent of the agricultural production in the world.
“Diversified plants could secure healthy nutrition diets and protect the environment,” he explained.
He added that even in low-income and poor countries where food isn’t always sufficient, people are also subject to overweight diseases along with poverty because of the high prices of the healthy food.
A fifth of the world’s death toll is caused by bad nutrition habits, he stressed.
“Unhealthy nutrition in all shapes burdens the world’s economy with 3.5 trillion U.S. dollars annually,” the FAO official added.
He urged the governments to spend more on nutritional plants and healthy diets.
Egypt has been successful in providing food, but so far, it needs to exert more efforts to tackle malnutrition, “one of the main challenges that face the country’s development,” according to Alamin.
Egypt sees 35 percent of malnutrition among children under five years old while obesity among adults has reached worrying levels, he added.
FAO and Egyptian Ministry of Agriculture have implemented a project of improving the nutrition and the food security in five provinces across Egypt, which focused on the food diversity and improving the agricultural methods to avoid any waste, Alamin said.
Meanwhile, Egyptian Minister of Agriculture and Land Reclamation Ezz El-Din Abu Steit stressed the importance of providing healthy nutrition systems for all along with practicing physical exercises.
“A healthy diet is defined as a moderate system in eating food that contains essential nutrition groups without excessive use of sugar and fat,” Abu Steit told Xinhua.
An Unhealthy diet causes spread of diseases that are associated with malnutrition like obesity and overweight, he explained.
National studies found that malnutrition among children especially in rural areas leads to death, the minister added, warning against consumption of a high amount of junk food while ignoring exercising.
“In Egypt, more than 7 million citizens are suffering from overweight diseases,” the minister said, adding that it is now urgent to quickly shift to the health routine meals.
He touched upon the cooperation between the Ministry of Agriculture and FAO in carrying out some projects for improving the food security and nutrition for Egyptian families by targeting women and children in the poorest villages.
The projects focused on providing healthy meals, he said, adding that the UN organization is jointly working with the Egyptian Ministry of Agriculture to support sustainable agricultural development in Egypt within the country’s development plan 2030.
