Battling Malnutrition: FAO joins hands with Bangladeshi lawmakers
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) yesterday formed an alliance with the members of parliament (MPs) to work together in combating malnutrition and climate change.
As part of the coalition, the UN organisation will exchange its knowledge and experience -- regarding sustainable food and agricultural production -- with the lawmakers to help the country achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, said a press release.
The announcement was made at a workshop titled “Food and nutrition security” jointly organised by FAO and Jatiya Sangsad at a hotel in Dhaka.
In recent years, FAO has started to engage with parliamentarians and NGOs of different countries to double the efforts in fighting hunger and malnutrition.
As part of that, FAO has already forged such alliances with the parliamentarians of Japan and the Philippines. Bangladesh is the first country in South Asia with which it has formed the coalition, said the release.
More than half of the world’s malnourished children live in Asia and the Pacific, and Bangladesh is the third country in South Asia in terms of the highest prevalence of undernourished persons, according to FAO.
Shirin Sharmin Chaudhury, speaker of the Jatiya Sangsad; Abdur Razzaque, agriculture minister; Robert D Simpson, representative of FAO in Bangladesh; Matia Chowdhury, chairperson of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on the Ministry of Agriculture, and several MPs were present at the workshop.
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