PRESIDENTIAL SECRETARIAT CLARIFIES

With reference to the Fact Check that appeared in yesterday’s (14 /02 /19) Daily Mirror under the headline “President overstates undernourishment”, President’s Advisor Shiral Lakthilaka has sent the following note.

While welcoming your newspaper’s desire to fact check news, I refer to your newspaper’s front page news on President Maithripala Sirisena’s statement made in October last year about the status of undernourishment in Sri Lanka, published under the subject of a Fact check.

Celebrating World Food Day, on October 16, 2018, President Maithripala Sirisena highlighted the idea of food equity, while referring to the high prevalence of food waste and the need to reduce it.as has been shown by Global Hunger Index (GHI), which the original text has also referred to, hunger is a multidimensional phenomenon. Hunger, malnutrition and under-nutrition are concepts with different connotations.the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), for its calculation, uses a method based on a national threshold to calculate under-nutrition.

Further, the news article deviates from the claim it makes about nutrition of the whole population of the country and quotes the criteria of calculating child under-nutrition of UNICEF.THE GHI score of Sri Lanka is 17.9, and the country ranks 67th out of 119 qualifying countries. (You may have noticed that the said original version has quoted this wrongly as 65th).