The best and worst of the world's eats

 Sudanese refugee mother has a daily struggle to feed her children in the Birak refugee camp, Chad. Photo by Cynthia Jones/World Food Program via Getty Images.

Fit, healthy Australians. Sleek, cycling Dutch. Icelanders living on dried fish.

Not so much, says a new survey, Good Enough to Eat, released Wednesday by Oxfam, compiled from data gathered by international organizations.

 It’s a global food index that weighs the most important factors of dietary health, including affordability, quantity, diversity and nutritiousness of food, as well as a country’s rate of obesity and diabetes. And it has turned up some surprising results.

Where's the best place to eat?

The Netherlands. And the much-touted French and Swiss come in second.

Canada ranks only 25th of 125 countries, thanks to growing obesity and “unhealthy eating.”

The problem is more than a plethora of poutine. “Even in a wealthy country like Canada there’s a big gap between what people need and what they get,” says Oxfam Canada’s Robert Fox, pointing out that aboriginal communities suffer most, and in Nunavut more than half of children live in food insecurity. Fox calls for a “national food policy” in Canada, and an overseas aid policy  that is focused on women food producers.

But food problems are often complex, the report points out.

While the Dutch have the highest overall rating  – and a well-known fondness for riding bicycles – they score lower on the obesity measure, with 19 per cent of people surveyed classed as fat. (Too many Dutch treats?)

Even worse is Australia, whose svelte beach bunny image is blown away by an obesity rate of 27 per cent. And 9 per cent of Australians also have diabetes.

At the very bottom of the unhealthy eating scale, strangely, are wealthy Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, which rate an “F” for obesity and diabetes.

Icelanders, not noted for grand cuisine, rate at the top of the food quality and diet diversity scale, in spite of their limited farm land and relatively high food prices.

But sadly, it’s all too easy to predict those at the bottom end of the index.

Impoverished Chad – home to hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees – is lowest overall, with food that’s too little and too dear. It also has scant nutritional value, and is kept in unsanitary conditions. One child in three is underweight. 

Meanwhile Angola, also near the bottom of the scale, suffers the highest level of food price volatility, except for inflation-battered Zimbabwe. In Angola, “60 per cent of people’s diet is made up of simple carbohydrates and almost half the population do not have access to clean water” to prepare food safely.

In Burundi, a whopping 67 per cent of people are undernourished, and 35 per cent of children are underweight. A number of other African countries have scores that are little better.

One surprise: the worst score for underweight children is in “Asian tiger” India –  some  44 per cent of kids have lower than normal weight, making them vulnerable to stunting and learning disabilities.

“Inequality, weak distribution, failed markets and poor governance mean that people in many countries go to bed hungry, especially women,” says Oxfam, calling for “urgent reform of the way food is produced and distributed around the world to put an end to this scandal.”

Olivia Ward has covered countries from the former Soviet Union, Middle East and South Asia, winning national and international awards.

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Child brides sacrificed on wedding altars

Three-year-old Sunam, wears her engagement outfit and holds hands with her fiance, her 7-year-old cousin, Nieem, in Kabul, Afghanistan, July 2007. (AP Photo/Farzana Wahidy)

Rajani was a “midnight bride,” in the rugged Indian desert state of Rajastan: one of many who are too young to marry legally, at 18, but are wedded in secret, in late night village ceremonies.  Only five, she toddled to her wedding in a pink t-shirt and plastic sun glasses. She had never met her husband-to-be, who was 10. 

Her story, reported by Cynthia Gorney in National Geographic, is not unusual in the tragic world of child brides, who may be married off to cancel family debts, solidify clan relationships, rid a poor family of an unwanted mouth to feed or avoid a daughter’s “dishonor” from male attentions as she reaches puberty.

The sorry practise is highlighted in Ottawa this week at a photo exhibition to help support young girls who are forcibly married -- and save an estimated 142 million others from meeting the same fate over the next decade.

Presented at Carleton University’s Art Gallery, it was opened on Tuesday by Foreign Minister John Baird and Status of Women Minister Rona Ambrose. The travelling exhibition, launched in 2012 by the UN’s population fund and the photo agency VII, was sponsored in Canada by the government, the university and UNFPA.

Photographed by Stephanie Sinclair and Jessica Dimmock, it features award-winning images that show the horrifying reality of the daily lives of girls whose childhoods are stolen and whose futures are held captive by poverty, custom and family control.

Many are taken from school before they can read and write, isolated from their friends and families and forced into sex and childbirth at ages when both can endanger their lives. Those who survive often live in near-slavery, dying prematurely from exhaustion and preventable diseases.

The statistics are daunting.

According to the World Health Organization, about 39,000 under age girls are married every day. At current levels, that’s more than 14 million a year. And, says Rachel Vogelstein of the Council on Foreign Relations, the author of a study released this month on ending child marriage, of the 140 million or more who will marry before the age of 18, 50 million will be younger than 15.

Although India accounts for 40 per cent of known child brides, the tradition is pervasive in South Asia, Sub Saharan Africa – as well as parts of Latin America and the Middle East, Vogelstein says in her report. The top five rates of child marriage are in Niger, Chad, Central African Republic, Bangladesh and Guinea, where more than 60 per cent of brides are younger than 18.

“The practise of child marriage is a violation of human rights,” says Vogelstein. “Every day girls around the world are forced to leave their families, marry against their will, endure sexual and physical abuse, and bear children while still in childhood themselves.”

Although marriage of girls under 18 is illegal in 158 countries, those that put little value on female lives often turn a blind eye.

Occasionally, girls manage to escape -- like 10-year-old Nujood Ali of Yemen, who became world famous by turning up in a city courthouse and announcing that she wanted a divorce. Her success encouraged others, and the liberated youngsters won public applause, though five years later Nujood is still battling for her rights.

Most are not so lucky.

The struggle to end child marriage depends on ensuring that girls are educated and have opportunities to earn a living. And above all, countries must attack the root causes that devalue the lives of girls and women from cradle to grave.

Olivia Ward has covered conflicts, human rights and politics from the former Soviet Union to South Asia and the Middle East. An Emmy-winning film, The Selling of Innocents, was based on her reporting on trafficking of girls in India. 

Unhappy anniversary for Darfur's frightened civilians

Sudanese President Omar al Bashir in the capital Khartoum on April 22, 2010. Bashir came to power in a 1989 military coup backed by Islamists and later won an election. (Ashraf Shazly/AFP/Getty Images)

Remember Darfur?

It was the cause du jour a decade ago, when thousands of people were slaughtered by the forces of Sudanese President Omar al Bashir, and 2.7 million driven out of their homes.

Since then, Bashir has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and genocide, a peacekeeping force was assembled and the buzz around Darfur has died down to a whisper.

But it’s not as though Bashir has let the people of the western Darfur region live in peace. Many of them are squatting in camps where they’re subjected to a campaign of fear by government forces: killings, attacks, looting, kidnapping and sexual violence, according to human rights reports.

The notorious janjaweed militias – blamed for many of the deaths in Darfur and not acknowledged by Bashir as under his command -- are now members of the Border Guards enlisted by Sudanese Military Intelligence. It doesn’t get much clearer than that.

In and out of uniform they’ve continued to attack Darfur civilians, most recently in February, when hundreds of gunmen launched a major assault on the northern Darfur town of El Siref, which sheltered some 60,000 displaced people. More than 50 were killed and 66 wounded.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, armed rebels believed to be backed by Sudan’s government opened fire on a UN convoy, killing five peacekeepers and seven civilian workers in South Sudan.

And Bashir?

He’s as free as ever, and is scheduled to appear Wednesday at an anti-desertification summit in neighboring Chad – which is a member of the ICC, but has refused on three earlier visits to arrest him and ship him to The Hague.

It’s backed by other African Union countries which deferred co-operation with the international court on the grounds that heads of state have immunity from prosecution. They have asked the International Court of Justice for its opinion.

While the diplomatic dance continues, so does the bloodshed.

“In the last three months alone,” says Amnesty International, “500 people were reportedly killed and roughly 100,000 displaced in attacks against civilians that have involved members of government forces.”

In other words, déjà vu.

Olivia Ward has covered conflicts, politics and human rights from the former Soviet Union to the Middle East and South Asia, winning national and international awards. 

 



 

Poachers massacre 86 elephants, including 33 pregnant ones, in Chad

 A herd of elephants walk backdropped by Mt. Kilimanjaro in Amboseli game park in Kenya in 2006.(AP)

Armed ivory poachers slaughtered at least 86 elephants, including 33 pregnant ones and 15 calves, in Chad in the past week.

According to reports out of the central African country, some 50 Arabic-speaking poachers shot the elephants with machine guns while riding horses, hacked out the tusks and left the animals to die.

The animals were killed near Fianga, a town close to the border between Chad and Cameroon, according to the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). Fianga is near a cross-border national park area where many pachyderms spend the dry season before the rains start in April.

“The killing of 86 elephants, including pregnant cows, is evidence of the callous brutality demanded to feed the appetite of the ivory trade,” Celine Sissler-Bienvenu, head of IFAW in France and Francophone Africa, said in a statement.

She said it would take two decades for the population to recover.

About 30 years ago, there were 150,000 animals across the region; today that figure could be as low as 2,000, wildlife officials estimate.

Chad-based NGO SOS Elephants reported late last year that hundreds of elephants had moved into Chad to escape poaching in Bouba N'Djida park in Cameroon, where 650 elephants were killed within days in February 2012.

Cameroon has since deployed military helicopters and troops to its national parks to protect elephants, Reuters reported last year.

Poachers target elephants for their ivory which is smuggled to Chinese markets through Sudanese and Nigerian ports.

Raveena Aulakh is the Toronto Star's environment reporter. She is intrigued by climate change and its impact, now and long-term. Follow her on Twitter @raveenaaulakh