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Patterns of Protein-Energy Malnutrition and Food Deprivation among Infants and Toddlers in Africa South of the Sahara

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

James Newman  and
Catherine Gulliver
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Extract

In at least one respect the mid and late 1970s have been similar to the mid and late 1960s, namely in the amount of attention devoted to the problem of world hunger. From a variety of popular and professional media the message is broadcast clearly that millions of people are starving and malnourished and that the future will be even more bleak than the present unless population growth is slowed, food production increased, and wealth redistributed. Africa, in particular, has become a source of much concern. The recent highly publicized famines in the Sahel and Ethiopia, and recurrent food shortages in such places as Senegal, Tanzania, Zaire, Zambia, and Botswana have given the impression of widespread precarious food-population balances. Additionally, it is stated that numerous deficiency diseases are virtually endemic, especially among young children.

The exact dimensions of food deprivation in Africa are not well know, however. This is because most food related investigations traditionally have focused on production rather than consumption, and when they have been concerned with consumption they have dealt either with selected, localized populations, or with highly aggregated data, usually at the national scale. The many volumes by Jacques May (1965, 1967, 1968, 1970, 1971) on the ecology of malnutrition provide examples of both of these approaches. Generally missing are middle range comparative analyses that attempt to delineate and explain patterns of similarities and differences from place to place and culture to culture. Yet as Whitehead (1977) has noted, there is considerable variability with regard to who is malnourished and why, and thus it is precisely these investigations that are needed in order to avoid the “blanket approaches” to remedial policies which he rightly condemns.

Type
Research Article
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , September 1979 , pp. 65 - 76
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1979

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