Doug Lorimer

Acute malnutrition among Iraqi children under five years of ago had doubled since the US invasion and occupation two years ago, Jean Ziegler, the UN Human Rights Commission's special expert on the right to food, told a session of the Geneva-based commission on March 30.

Reporting the results of a study conducted last November by the Norwegian-based Fafo Institute for Applied Social Science, Ziegler told the 53-nation commission that more than a quarter of Iraqi children did not get enough to eat. According to the institute, last year 7.7% of Iraqi children under five suffered acute malnutrition, compared to 4% prior to the March 2003 US-led invasion.

Some 6.5 million Iraqis, 25% of the entire population, remain highly dependent on food rations according to the UN's World Food Program. A WFP report released last May said that just under half of that figure were so poor that they have to resell part of their food rations to buy basic necessities such as medicine and clothes. A further 3.6 million Iraqis, 14% of the population, would become food insecure if the rationing system were discontinued.

The US study was conducted by researchers from Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and the Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, and was published in the British Lancet medical journal.

From Green Left Weekly, April 6, 2005.
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