Child Growth and Nutrition in Developing Countries: Priorities for Action (Food Systems and Agrarian Change)

What can be done for the estimated 190 million of the world's children under age five who are chronically undernourished? This book presents a broad, multidisciplinary approach to eliminating child malnutrition in developing countries. Exploring causes, consequences, and solutions, the volume gives operationally useful information on cost-effective ways to reach, hear, and respond to the needs of vast numbers of impoverished families, especially mothers, with diverse cultural values and practices. The focus is on what in fact works, what does not, and why.
Nineteen experts offer current knowledge and perspectives from nutrition, public health, epidemiology, agricultural and consumer economics, anthropology, child development, rural sociology, and community development. Combining academic perspectives with practical experience, they spell out ways of implementing simple nutritional/growth-promoting strategies that are financially and technically feasible.
Technology can and does play an important role, the authors believe, but it has proved to be ineffective, by itself, in addressing protein-energy malnutrition. The volume concludes that effective and sustainable solutions to malnutrition must be found through careful analysis of the behavior of individuals, households, and communities - preferably with community involvement in the analysis - to identify the ways in which community-based or external interventions can be designed or redesigned to improve nutrition.