Campaign for Better Nutrition Reaches Far East

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Volume 81, Issue 49, 20 November 1937, Page 18

Campaign for Better Nutrition Reaches Far East

GENEYA — A determined international drive to overeome the Inertia of centuries in the Far Eastern countryside and give its millions of peasants a higher standard of living is being made by the League of Nations. Not long ago a conference of all tho Par Eastern Health Administrations met under League auspices at Bandoeng in Java to stir the Governments into activity. ; After a two years' investigation on the spot, the League 's Health Committee xeported to the conference that in all Asiatie countries "only relatively trifling sums" are allocated to the detailed study of nutrition or to attempts to improve it. This all-import-ant field, the authorities apparentiy feol, should ■ be left • to private initiative, and only in the event of war or economie depression do they decide to act. Yet all the investigations of the League 's experts into the state of health of the peoples of the Ear East invariably lead back to the problem of nutrition. "The prevailing opinion," they declare, ' 'is that the state of nutrition of Tural districts is not wholly satisfaetory in any of the Asiatie countries. It is thought that, of the 3,150,000,000 inhabitants of that continent, not less than 75 per cent have'a diet below the standards fixed by European research. From various publications, and f rom ' the inf ormation that the committee collected during its tour, it appears that a large part of the population is , living on the border-line of the minimum requirements, .while millions are even below that level." IJnlike other continents, there is no overproduction of food in Asia, where it has never had to be destroyed on that account. Everything produced is quickly consumed and tho dominant question every whero is how to iucrease erops. Furthermore, the food problem of the East is almost exclusively a rural problem slnco more than 90 per ceat,o£ the people, liva outside towns.