BANGALORE: Vinita Bali, managing director of Britannia Industries, is among 27 global leaders appointed by the United Nations to help improve maternal and child nutrition, an investment which some of the world's leading economists believe would be the most valuable for human well-being and productivity.
Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever, is the only other business person in a list that includes heads of state, civil society representatives, UN system organizations and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. "Never before have so many leaders, from so many countries and fields, agreed to work together to improve nutrition," UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon said about the creation of the group.
Speaking exclusively to TOI, Vinita Bali noted that at a Copenhagen summit in May this year, the consensus among Nobel Prize economists was that malnutrition was the biggest issue facing the world. "It is not Greece, it is not exchange rate, not what is happening in the United States. The best brains in the world are looking at economic development and identifying malnutrition as the No. 1 problem," she said.
The formation of the UN group builds on the activities of the global Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) movement that the UN began in 2009. The group's objective is to guide the implementation of the SUN framework in the 27 countries that are signatories to SUN. India, significantly, is not among the signatories. "This despite the fact that India has over 40% of the world's underweight children below 5 years, and 38% of the world's malnourished children, " she said, and noted ironically that the Prime Minister himself had called malnutrition a "national shame" when he released the HUNGaMA (hunger and malnutrition) report earlier this year.
She said India had also one of the worst records in meeting the UN's Millennium Development goals, which included among others, halving extreme poverty, reducing by two-thirds the under-five mortality rate and by three-quarters the maternal mortality ratio by 2015.
"We are now in 2012, and there are some countries like Brazil, Thailand, some African countries that have already crossed the Millennium Development goals. Many others are racing well towards achieving the goals, except Mera Bharat Mahaan," she said.
Bali said improving nutrition is a precondition to achieving goals of eradicating poverty and hunger, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health and combating disease — which all contribute to a stronger future for communities and nations.
"There has to be not just enough access to food, but also enough access to the right kind of nutrients. Attention is also needed on maternal health. The first 1,000 days (from conception) of a child's life is the most critical. If the foetus is not getting enough nutrition from the mother because the mother is under-nourished, that is what leads to underweight babies, leading in turn to stunted adults. And stunted adults lead to loss of productivity and loss of productivity leads to lower GDP growth rate. It's not rocket science and yet it's not addressed," she said.
Under Bali, who joined Britannia in 2005 after long stints with Cadbury and Coca-Cola globally, the biscuit major has been active in the mass nutrition space.
In 2009, Bali founded the Britannia Nutrition Foundation, which distributes fortified biscuits to schoolchildren. Britannia has been partnering with the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), another initiative of the UN that was started in 2002. GAIN supports public-private partnerships to increase access to the missing nutrients in diets necessary for people and communities.
Britannia was chosen to share a progress update on its work at the closing plenary of the Clinton Global Initiative's annual meeting in 2009.