Chinese kids free from hunger, experience for global peers

By Xinhua writer Zhou Zhou

"Hunger?" Wang Yaya, 15, considers its meaning: "I'm craving for lunch at 11 a.m. on weekdays, and my stomach is growling in the long queues at KFC."

A middle school student in Xinzhou, a small city in China's northern Shanxi Province, Wang is slightly puzzled by the word "hunger."

Recently, her mother, Yu Bo, and maternal grandmother, Wang Yanan, have been at odds over Yaya's growing good appetite. Grandmother's golden law is "More food makes a stronger physique," but the mother disagrees.

"Eat moderately. You're a big girl," Yu protests whenever her own mother persuades Yaya to eat another bowl of rice. Yaya is 1.72 meters tall and weighs 60 kilograms, making her bigger than her peers.

Yaya is one of the new generation of Chinese to whom "hunger" equates to dieting and to whom the country's many famines are only known through history lessons.

However, the specter of starvation still haunts much of the world. A total of 1.02 billion people, about a sixth of the global population, were undernourished in 2009, according to estimates by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. The number was 105 million higher than in 2008 because of economic crisis and rising grain prices.

Children are the worst affected. The World Health Organization cites hunger as the gravest single threat to the world's public health, and malnutrition, which is prevalent in developing countries, is by far the biggest cause to child mortality.

Ann Veneman, executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), said in a statement on Oct. 17, the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, "Children who are chronically undernourished before their second birthday are likely to have diminished cognitive and physical development for the rest of their lives."

A survey by India's MS Swaminathan Research Foundation and the UN World Food Program showed 21 percent of India's population, more than 230 million people, were undernourished, accounting for 27 percent of the world's hungry people. Almost 50 percent of India's child deaths were linked to malnutrition.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Child (UNCRC), which was adopted on Nov. 20, 1989, sets out the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of children, and underscores their right to life that is very often compromised by scarcity of food.

Despite the challenges, China has dragged the vast majority of its 1.3 billion people out of hunger within only one generation.

Action Aid, a global anti-poverty agency, released a report on Oct. 16 saying China and Brazil topped the scorecard in the fight against hunger.

Visiting Beijing in October to celebrate 30 years of cooperation between the UN World Food Program (WFP) and the Chinese government, Sheila Sisulu, deputy WFP executive director, said, "One reason I am here is to see first-hand by myself to find and inquire how it happened."

Population Control

Wang Yanan, born in 1949, still remembers going hungry as a child.

"Father earned the family's bread by hard work, and he had the best portion. We kids usually had a dollop of thin gruel and some sorghum bread. We hung our heads and suppressed our urge to look at the scrambled egg that was cooked for Dad," she says.

Wang was the oldest of five children when each person was rationed with coupons to 14 kilograms of grain a month, barely enough to fill the belly.

In the 1970s, the government began to adopt the family planning policy which has prevented an estimated 400 million births over the last 30 years, according to the National Statistics Bureau.

Hania Zlotnik, director of the UN population division, said the family-planning policy made an important contribution to world population control and set a good example for other countries.

"In past, one bread-winner supported seven people, but now a couple support one child. What a difference," says Wang.

In many one-child families, however, spoiled children have become more particular about food.

Yu Dandan, 27, attributes her tiny stature to the fact that "perhaps I was too picky about food and ate too many snacks in childhood."

Adequate Food

Population control is not a cure-all for poverty reduction. Zlotnik attributed China's success in poverty reduction to its "development mode."

Yu Bo, 41, still remembers eating "red-plus-white" and "white-plus-red" dumplings as a child.

The red-plus-white dumpling was made of sorghum dough with tofuresidue fillings, while the white-plus-red was made of wheat flour with meat stuffing.

"The white-plus-red was much better than the red-plus-white. The latter was too hard to swallow," recalls Yu.

In northern Shanxi Province, on the loess plateau, sorghum, millet and maize have long been the staple foods.

Non-staple food was extremely lacking in the 1960s and 1970s, when its producers could be accused of "taking the capitalist road."

However, oil, meat, eggs, vegetables and fruits have become more common since the rural reforms of 1978 that gave farmers more autonomy.

"The rationing system continued in the 1980s, but in a looser way. Our table was increasingly more abundant when I studied in middle school," says Yu. "I could eat guoyourou (oil-fried pork slices, a traditional Shanxi dish)."

The General Chamber of Commerce reported that China's annual per capita pork consumption in cities in 2007 was 18.2 kilograms, 2.2 times that in 1950, while that in rural areas was 13.4 kilograms, 3.3 times higher.

Also, China's Engel's Coefficient, which measures the amount of money spent on food compared with total income, fell from 57.5 percent in 1978 to 37.9 percent in 2008 in cities, and from 67.7 percent to 43.7 percent in rural areas.

A survey of children's physiques by the Ministry of Health found Chinese children were 6 centimeters taller on average in 2005 than in 1975.

One of the most effective weapons in China's fight against hunger has been technical and policy support for agricultural development.

As most of China's impoverished people live in countryside, the government packaged the policies of food price controls and farmland preservation.

The minimum grain purchase price is implemented to encourage grain planting, guaranteeing grain supplies and incomes for farmers.

Meanwhile, the government has set a minimum arable land area of 120 million hectares, and is planning to set up a purchasing and storage mechanism to increase national reserves of grain, arable oil and meat.

Intensive cultivation has also ensured that China, with just 62percent of the farmland area of the United States, produced 38 percent more grain.

The hybrid rice species initially cultivated by scientist Yuan Longping, yielded 20 percent more per unit than other rice plants. About 60 percent of the country's total rice production is reliant on hybrid technologies.

In the last 10 years, China's self-sufficiency rate in grain has remained above 95 percent. According to the UN Occasional Paper on Food Prices Issues in the People's Republic of China, cereal prices in China are "insulated from global market trends" due to the government's emphasis on "self-sufficiency and price stability."

Nov. 20 is the 20th anniversary of the UNCRC. China has contributed to better protection of the rights of children by insulating them from hunger.

The country is beginning to offer aid to other developing countries, such as donations of contraceptives to Kenya and Uganda.

However, feeding children is the long-term, global task. China saw 17.37 million births in 2007, the UNICEF 2009 Child Report showed and it must also face the challenges of climate change and soil degradation.

Hunger is fading from the collective Chinese memory, but the belief in preparing for foul weather in fair times remains.

"We have the responsibility to save food," says Wang Yu, citing a popular public slogan.

Source: Xinhua