73 pc of Bangladeshis can’t afford healthy food

Industry Desk: According to a recent report, around 76% of Bangladeshis cannot afford healthy food.
A Bangladeshi has to spend an average of Tk 276 to buy healthy food daily, according to a report titled “The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2022”.
The report was published jointly by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, UNICEF, the World Food Program and the World Health Organization.
According to the report, in 2017, the percentage of people unable to afford healthy food was 77.4 in Bangladesh. In 2022, the number has been reduced to 73%.
The survey found that among South Asian countries, Nepal was the least able to buy healthy food, followed by Pakistan.
Sri Lanka and Bhutan were the first countries in the region to be able to afford a healthy diet, while India was slightly better off than Bangladesh in this respect.
The survey found that 41.1% of South Asians on average cannot afford healthy food.
Additionally, nearly 3.1 billion people could not afford healthy diets in 2020, the report said, adding that was 112 million more than in 2019.
This figure reflects consumer food price inflation resulting from the economic impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic and the measures put in place to contain it.
Despite hopes that the world would emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic in 2021 and food security would start to improve, global hunger rose further in 2021, the survey found.
The rise in global hunger in 2021 reflects exacerbated inequalities between countries and within countries due to an uneven pattern of economic recovery between countries and unrecovered income losses among those most affected by the crisis. The Covid-19 pandemic.
Globally in 2020, an estimated 22% of children under five were stunted, 6.7% were wasted and 5.7% were overweight.
Children from rural areas and poorer households, whose mothers had no formal education, were more vulnerable to stunting and wasting, while children from urban areas and wealthier households ran a higher risk of being overweight, the report says.
He said that the challenges to end hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition are growing and that the pandemic has exposed the fragilities of the agri-food system as well as the inequalities of societies, leading to a further increase world hunger and severe food insecurity.