No country has truly woken up to the severity of malnutrition, say experts

CNBC-TV18 on Monday spoke to Haddad, and Vinita Bali, former MD, Britannia Industries, Chairperson, CII Natl Nutrition Committee on the issue of food security and nutrition security.

Bali emphasised that it is not just about providing food, but it is about ensuring that people have access to a healthy and balanced diet. This is a multifaceted issue with both supply and demand-side factors. “We need to do everything we possibly can to ensure that people get not just food, but nutritious food. This is a fairly complex problem to deal with. It has a supply side, which is what is being produced, what is being marketed where and how it is being sold at what prices, and then it's got the demand side issue,” she said.

She added that India has got good programmes structurally -- Integrated Child Development Services Scheme (ICDS), midday meal scheme, public distribution system (PDS), which is reaching 800 million people with basic cereal. " I think we have really got the infrastructure that if executed better than we have, if executed with energy, if executed with relevance to where we are today can for a large part change what we are impacting," she said.

To tackle this issue, action is required on many fronts, and the missing ingredient in India's situation is everything between the farm and the market. There needs to be diversification in the farm-to-market part of the food system. Unfortunately, food loss is very high in India, and a lot of perishable foods are getting lost between the farm and the market, Bali added.

Haddad mentioned that it’s concerning that ESG standards don't address the issue of nutrition. Haddad also said that the research community is not doing enough on the consequences of malnutrition and the potential solutions to combat it.

Talking about role that private sector can play, Bali said, “One, of course, is taking the whole issue of post-harvest loss, the estimate in India is about 30 to 35 percent. That is an area where whether it is investment in cold chain, investment in facilities closer to where harvesting happens, processing closer to where harvesting happens. That's all a question of identifying the opportunity, making the investment and seeing it work, you cannot possibly go wrong, because there's a huge opportunity there.”

She added there is a lot that food companies themselves can do to look at the products they sell and ask themselves a question, which is, can they make it more nutritious than it is, "it could be micronutrient fortification, it could be changing in the formulation itself and so on,” she said.