Submitted by crinadmin on
[9 May 2012] - Most people’s reaction to numbers which claim to describe the state of the world is a wary acceptance. The statistics are probably a bit bogus but what else is there to go on? Just occasionally, however, a set of figures comes along that tests the limits of tolerance. Save the Children, an international charity, has just perpetrated one such set. It purports to show which countries have made the greatest gains, and which have lost the most ground, in the fight against child malnutrition. Child malnutrition is an extremely damaging problem which went neglected for years, and Save the Children has done a great deal of good in alerting governments around the world to its significance. But this table will not do its credibility many favours. According to the charity, half of the six most successful countries are in Central Asia. This finding is—how can one put it politely?—counter-intuitive. Number one on the list is Uzbekistan, a vicious dictatorship which imprisons political opponents and has been the site of mass killings. Number three, Turkmenistan, had for many years one of the world’s stranger dictators who renamed the days of the week after himself and members of his family. Most development institutions have given up on this miserable duo and social indicators must be treated with a certain scepticism. It is possible that they have made huge strides in reducing an intractable problem that has eluded the likes of, say, India. But there is another possibility. One of the sources given for the numbers is Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS). DHS surveys are the gold standard of social research. They involve having researchers go out with a huge questionnaire and spend several hours in people’s homes filling in the forms. It is just possible that when a total stranger shows up in an Uzbek or Turkmen village bearing a several-hundred-page long questionnaire and starts asking questions about family life, villagers conclude that the secret police is taking an unhealthy interest and tell any old lies to make them go away. Of course, there is another possible explanation. The sixth most successful country on the list is, according to Save the Children, North Korea, where children are doubtless stuffed full of sweets and other good things as they march off singing to the gulags. The founder of North Korea’s dictatorship, Kim Il Sung, elaborated an obscure ideology of his own called juche which more or less replaced normal education in the country and is obligatory for Koreans to learn. Turkmenistan’s first president, Saparmurat Niyazov, similarly insisted that his autobiographical “Ruhnama” contained everything any decent Turkmen needed to know. It thus fulfilled the same sort of function that Mao Zedong’s “Little Red Book” had in China in the 1970s. It seems unlikely, but perhaps the solution to child malnutrition is to have an insane personality cult backed up by an obscure and monomaniacal ideological text. Further Information: