国際栄養政策の動向

Abstract

Some of the most influential bodies for the direction of international nutrition policies are the United Nations System·Standing Committee on Nutrition (SCN), the international conferences and summits related to nutritional matters, the general assembly of the United Nations and the guidelines on nutrition by United Nations organizations or authorized academic associations. SCN promotes cooperation amongst UN agencies to strengthen the coherence and the impact of actions against malnutrition with other partner organizations. The International Conference on Nutrition and the World Food Summit were held in the 1990s, and the objectives that were established were to halve the number of food-insecure and malnourished people by the 21st century, although these objectives are still far from being met. Millennium Development Goals established at the UN General Assembly in 2000 with the declared intent of radicating extreme poverty and hunger, reducing child mortality and improving maternal health, with emphasis placed on nutrition activities for achieving these goals. WHO has reported that child and maternal underweight are the leading global risk to disease, disability and death in the world today. Many guidelines have been developed by such responsible organizations, as WHO and UNICEF, and by academic associations to share a common understanding for combating global malnutrition, including PEM, iron deficient anemia, vitamin A deficiency and iodine deficiency. Although governments of developing countries and donors follow these guidelines, effective measures for nutrition related to HIV/AIDS, life-style related diseases, and anemia have yet to be sufficiently implemented, and measures for developing the international growth standards and food/nutrition aid in an emergency and during war are still challenging issues. Since poverty, hunger, conflict, population growth, food insecurity, infectious diseases, gender issues and environmental problems are strongly associated with feeding all the human beings, we have to widen the scope of nutrition science to adopt these challenging issues so that we can develop international nutrition as an applied science and contribute to combating global nutritional problems.