E-Kantipur

KATHMANDU, SEP 22 -

Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai and Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Narayan Kaji Shrestha attended high-level meetings and symposiums in New York on the sideline of the 66th United Nations General Assembly.

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Bhattarai, addressing a high-level meeting on nutrition, stated that chronic and acute malnutrition in Nepal has remained at a critical level with wide economic and geographic disparities. “Innovative efforts are needed to reach the most marginalised and poorest population groups suffering from malnutrition. We have proven and highly cost-effective solutions that we need to scale them up nationwide.”

“Nepal has made significant progress in reducing under-five mortality from 91 per thousand live births in 2001 to 54 per thousand in 2011, and we are on track to achieve the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 4,” Bhattarai said. Improving nutrition has played a critical role in bringing child mortality further down in Nepal, he said.

He also participated in a high-level event on “Every Women, Every Child” hosted by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

In the function, he said Nepal is committed to implement free delivery service, which has directly benefited over 350,000 mothers since its implementation two years ago. 

The Government of Nepal (GoN) is investing in the expansion of birthing centres, Basic Essential Obstetric Care (BEOC) and Comprehensive Essential Obstetric Care (CEOC), and partnering with the private as well as NGO sector to improve access to services to women living in remote districts and those who are marginalised, he said.

The Prime Minister also addressed the roundtable 5 of the United Nations Private Sector Forum 2011 on “Sustainable Energy for All: Water, Food and Energy Security” where he highlighted that the GoN is committed to addressing the problems related to water, food and energy security in an integrated manner.

Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs Narayan Kaji Shrestha on Tuesday participated in an interactive roundtable of a high level meeting of the UN General Assembly on desertification, land degradation and drought in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication.

“The world has witnessed an increasing trend of desertification, land degradation and drought and this has caused a profound impact on our agriculture, ecosystems, water resources, power supplies and the entire human life,” he said.

“Nepal is one of the LDCs which is grappling with poverty and underdevelopment. Its economy is basically dependant on climate-sensitive and subsistence agriculture, which has been negatively affected by the degradation of land along with desertification and drought,” said Shrestha. “This has caused the loss of agricultural productivity, and contraction of our economic activities, further pushing us towards the brink of extreme poverty and hunger.”

Posted on: 2011-09-22 09:07

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