By IANS
Lima : Fighting chronic child malnutrition, a problem that affects some 750,000 children in Peru, is one of the basic tools for combating poverty in the South American country, says a World Bank official.
Daniel Cotlear, the World Bank’s human development manager for Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela, is one of the authors of the study entitled “Social protection in Peru: how to improve results for the poor”.
The report identifies and examines the country’s main social problems, according to the Spanish news agency EFE.
The report says that one out every four 5-year-old children is malnourished and is not of the minimum adequate size and weight for their age, a circumstance that causes irreversible damage to their physical, intellectual and emotional development by creating physical disabilities and/or mental deficiencies that in the long term perpetuate poverty and social exclusion.
One of the biggest problems that is confronted in attempting to eradicate malnutrition lies, Cotlear said, in the “invisibility” that the situation has in society, which is so accustomed to living with the problem that it does not perceive its real dimensions.
Cotlear said, “Malnutrition (in Peru) implies a small size, kids with no spark, with difficulty learning. Those are the children who are on the street, whom we see every day.”
“We’re immunized to seeing them and accustomed to it being like this. We say: the indigenous poor children are small, dull, without the ability to learn. They are not happy,” the World Bank official said.
This perception also extends to the parents of the children in question, who think their kids are growing “normally” because the parents are accustomed to their deficient development, he added.
Forty-five percent of Peruvians are poor and 16 percent live in extreme poverty, and it is in those families where the rate of chronic child malnutrition stands at 47 percent.