Nutrition status in many impoverished districts has deteriorated further for installation of modern auto-rice mills, mainly for over-polishing rice by millers.
Apart from poverty and lack of dietary knowledge, rice polishing by automated rice mills leaves almost no nutrient in the staple.
Such mindless act causes a rise in zinc, vitamin A and other nutrient deficiencies in Panchagarh, Nilphamari, Gaibandha, Moulvibazar and Sunamganj, as the FE has visited the districts in recent months.
Official data shows undernourished children and women with malnutrition are still much higher in the districts than the national average.
Latifur Mian, a farm labourer at Uttar Bhogdaburi in Domar, Nilphamari, has seven members in the family, including his 66-year-old mother.
The man and his wife jointly earn a maximum of Tk 550 a day to feed the family and meet all other expenses.
"We need 4.0-kg rice daily for the family which costs a minimum of Tk 200 now. Potato and eggs are the food items we could afford," he said.
Broiler chicken or cultured fish could be bought twice or thrice a month, according to Mr Latifur.
Sourcing milk, fruit and red meat like beef or mutton are like a luxury. Even the rising cost of vegetable has also discouraged many to consume the item.
Mr Latifur's two sons below 10 were stunted and underweight than their age.
Dr Md Rayhan Bary, Domar upazila health and family planning officer, said many children and women in Bhogdaburi and other unions are suffering from malnutrition amid necessary dietary shortages.
He said rice, potato, farm eggs and pangas are the only food items they could somehow afford.
He said white-colour rice varieties, sold in the market, also lack nutrients, thereby leading to further malnutrition.
According to the district food office, Nilphamari has 20 out of 528 rice mills automated.
Auto mills have the capacity to husk 0.15-million tonnes of rice in three months of a milling season both in Boro or Aman time, said food directorate.
They are equipped with all modern facilities, from boiling to drying, husking to polishing to packaging.
Kamal Ali, a battery-run rickshaw-puller at Srimongol, Moulvibazar, has a four-member family. He is the only breadwinner with Tk 600 income daily on average.
He also spends 30 per cent of his earnings on buying rice. They can hardly consume nutrition-enriched food.
Nitai Roy at Debiganj of Panchagarh has three children, one of them mentally-challenged and the rest are underweight.
Lack of buying capacity for nutritious food as well as consumption of polished rice from the local auto mills has been deteriorating the nutrition status further.
Mr Roy said auto rice mills have also minimised the scope of work of day-labourers.
Semi-husking mills and their surrounding chatals (chatal is a cemented, plastered area of husking mills where paddy is being dried) earlier provided many jobs.
Panchagarh food directorate office said it has now 418 mills of which nine are automated, which could produce 45 per cent of the total rice.
Out of 0.22-million tonnes of husked rice, auto mills prepare 0.1-million tonnes, said the directorate.
The same picture was drawn in Sunamganj and Gaibandha districts where many auto mills have mushroomed in the past one decade.
The BBS Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS 2019) shows underweight kids under 2.0 are 25.7 per cent in Nilphamari, 29.1 in Gaibandha, 30.5 in Panchagarh, 27.8 in Moulvibazar and 29.8 in Sunamganj against the national average of 22.6 per cent.
It also showed the child stunting rates in the districts are 2.0-16 percentage points higher than the national average of 28.2 per cent.
Panchagarh and Sunamganj have recorded 40.5 and 44.2 per cent stunting rates considering children under two.
Nutrition specialist Dr Kazi Md Rezaul Karim said the average household expenditure on rice in Bangladesh is about 32 per cent of the total expenditure considering the extremely poor households.
He said brown or red parts of local rice varieties or those developed from local varieties have iron, zinc, vitamins A and B1, folic acid, some protein and so on.
New rice-milling methods polish brown or red parts from rice, thus vanishing nutrients.
"Behavioural change is needed by massive awareness so that consumers stopped consuming such white polished rice," said Mr Karim.
Meanwhile, food minister Sadhan Chandra Majumder recently warned against eating such polished rice.
He said consumption of polished rice makes people malnourished further in many districts.
He said this at an event styled 'The Commercial Journey of Fortified Rice in Bangladesh' in November 2022.
"The government has decided to ensure nutrition in every food. It has been included in all government policies, including the 8th Five-Year Plan," said the minister.
The country has achieved food autarky, thanks to the invention of new varieties of rice by researchers which also contain nutrients like zinc, vitamin A and so on.
"Without the initiative and investment by rice traders and rice mill owners, making nutritious rice available to the consumers will be impossible."
According to Mr Majumder, the government faces a shortage of 1.6-1.7-million tonnes of rice every year due to this polishing process.
He said five tonnes of rice get wasted for polishing every 100 tonnes of the staple.
The government will enact a law to stop the polishing of rice as it loses its inherited nutritional value in the process, said the minister.
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