Malnutrition in the Arab World

PLO spokeswoman Diana Buttu recently claimed on a San Francisco call-in radio program that "Malnutrition in [Palestinian] children is now peaking at 30%. And this is the same rate as in sub-Saharan Africa" The subtext was that Israel is responsible for the situation and that the world community must intervene to avert a "humanitarian crisis". A recent article in the Boston Globe with the headline Palestinian Malnutrition Found carries a similar subtext. Interestingly, neither the PLO representative nor the Boston Globe reporter thought to discuss the state of Palestinian nutrition in its regional context.

The following tables, drawn from United Nations and Arab sources, show the statistics for three significant measures of child nutrition in the Palestinian areas along with the Arab countries. As one can see, Diana Buttu's claims are unsupported by the data. Except for one of the three measures in Gaza (which has largely been under Palestinian control since 1994) Palestinian children would seem to be better off than most other Arab children, not to mention those of sub-Saharan Africa. Indeed, the children of the West Bank are among the best fed children in the Arab world.

(The three measures are: percentage of children age 5 and under who are: moderately or severely underweight, and show signs of moderate or severe "wasting" or "stunting")

Sources:
Data for the "West Bank" and "Gaza" are from USAID "Comprehensive Nutritional Assessment of the Palestinian Population", August 2002;
Data for "Sub-Saharan Africa" from UNICEF "State of the World's Children 2001";
Data for other Arab countries, including "Palestine (UNDP)" from the United Nations Development Programme "Arab Human Development Report 2002"