Civil society alliance greets KP Assembly and urges

Islamabad
While congratulating the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s minister for health and the provincial assembly for taking the lead in enactment of the ‘Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Protection of Breastfeeding and Child Nutrition Act 2015,’ Scaling Up Nutrition Civil Society Alliance Pakistan (SUN-CSA, Pak) has urged the federal and provincial governments to take steps for implementation of breastfeeding laws by establishing or activating Infant Feeding Boards and deputing-allocating human and financial resources.
In a press release issued here on Thursday, the Secretariat of SUN-CSA, Pak, a coalition of over 80 civil society organisations, has termed the legislation a monumental step in the right direction and has hoped that the provincial government will also take necessary steps to effectively implement the law by introducing its rules and by notifying the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Infant Feeding Board to monitor implementation of the law.
On January 9, the KP Assembly unanimously passed the said Act, thus rendering propagation or assertion of any material in any manner whatsoever by a manufacturer or a distributor that encourages bottle-feeding or discourages breastfeeding, a punishable deed.
Under the said law, an 11-member KP Infant Feeding Board would be constituted under by the provincial health minister. The board would report violations, recommend investigation against manufacturers, distributors or health workers, and advise the government on policies or guidelines for the promotion and protection of breastfeeding. Spearheaded by a district council nazim, in every district an eight-member district Infant Feeding Committee will also be formulated.
More importantly, the law makes it mandatory for breast milk supplement manufacturers to explicitly conspicuously display the public message which should clearly communicate and register the fact that any supplement or substitute whatsoever cannot replace the significance of mother’s milk and write on milk packages in bold characters ‘Mother’s milk is best for your baby and helps in preventing diarrhoea and other illnesses.’
The law prohibits labelling packages with any public message or advertising note that might discourage breastfeeding. It also directs to label the products with necessary information bilingually (both in English and Urdu) about the appropriate use of such products. The law would invalidate the sale of such products, which would fail to satisfy any provisions of the said law.
The new piece of legislation also makes it mandatory for health workers to support breastfeeding and stops them from promoting any so-called substitute product for infants. The law has defined “infant” as any baby up to the age of 12 months. Violators of the law can face imprisonment for a term that may extend up to two years, or a fine not less than Rs50,000 or more than Rs500,000 or both.
Unfortunately, Pakistan has the highest bottle-feeding rates and lowest exclusive breastfeeding rates in South Asia. The percentage of exclusively breast-fed children has remained static, and has risen only from 37.1 percent in 2006-07 to 37.7 percent in 2012-13. However, when it comes to the bottle-feeding rate, Pakistan has no close competitors; bottle-feeding rate has risen from an already undesirable 32.1% in 2006-07 to a high 41% in 2012-13.