School milk programme has been implemented to ease malnutrition in the country.

With a score of 15.3 out of 100, the level of hunger in Vietnam has beenclassified as “moderate”, according to the GHI 2019 report released by theIrish aid agency Concern Worldwide and Germany’s Welt Hunger Hilfe.

The GHI is a tool designed to comprehensively measure and track hunger atglobal, regional and national levels. GHI scores are calculated each year toassess progress and setbacks in combating hunger. The GHI is designed to raiseawareness and understanding of the struggle against hunger, provide a way tocompare levels of hunger between countries and regions, and call attention tothose areas of the world where hunger levels are highest and where the need foradditional efforts to eliminate hunger is greatest.

This year, the index measured 119 countries and territories around the world.For each country, GHI value was determined based on four indicators ofundernourishment, child wasting, child stunting and child mortality. GHI scores on a 100-point GHI Severity Scale, where 0is the best score (no hunger) and 100 is the worst.

Vietnam had its global hunger score fall from 28.3 (classified as serious) in2000 to 15.3 this year. The result was much better than those in regionalcountries such as Myanmar (19.8 and at 69th place), Indonesia (20.1and at 70th), the Philippines (20.1 and at 70th),Cambodia (22.8 and at 77th) and Laos (25.7 and at 87th).

Vietnam stood behind Thailand (46th)and Malaysia (57th) in the Southeast Asia.

Last year, the Vietnamese Government launched a “hunger elimination” campaignto reduce the rate of malnutrition through nutrition improvement andsustainable production of food.

According to the GHI report, theproportion of undernourished population in the country decreased from 24.3 percentin 2000 to 9.3 percent in 2019. The prevalence of wasting in children underfive years old dropped from 9 percent in 2000 to 6.4 percent nine years later.Meanwhile the child stunting rate was cut from 42.9 percent in 2000 to 24.6percent in 2019.

TheWorld Bank and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) recently called onthe Vietnamese Government to make more efforts to prevent child malnutrition byfunding nutrition-related programmes, building multi-sector plans to settledeterminants of undernourishment and making early interventions./. VNA

FAO calls for urgent actions to end hunger and malnutrition in Vietnam

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) representative in Vietnam called for urgent actions to end hunger and malnutrition at a meeting in Hanoi on Monday on the occasion of World Food Day (October 16).