Rotary Foundation chair calls for addressing malnutrition to eradicate polio

The humanitarian efforts of The Rotary Foundation focus on seven areas, which are promoting peace; fighting disease; providing clean water, sanitation and hygiene; saving mothers and children; supporting education; growing local economies; and protecting the environment.

Five years ago, there were only six focus areas, excluding the environment protection. However, during 2019-20, when the current chair of The Rotary Foundation, Mark Daniel Maloney, was serving as the president of Rotary International, he successfully advocated for the addition of the environment protection as the seventh area of focus.

Maloney, 69, who has been on a visit to Pakistan, gave an interview to The News, in which he said the issue of environment was close to his heart and he had played a major role in getting the Rotary leadership approve environment as an additional area of their focus.

When asked why the issue of environment was dear to him, he responded that he had two big reasons for that. The first thing he said was, “it was the right thing to do.” He explained that the environmental degradation was an important issue that we were facing in the world. The Rotary Foundation, he said, needed to be part of the solution.

“The second reason was a very selfish reason,” he remarked. “I believe that if we did not have the environment as the additional area of focus, there would be certain demographics, younger professionals, who would say Rotary is irrelevant.”

He stressed that if environmental protection was not one of The Rotary Foundation’s principles, the young professionals would consider it irrelevant. He said the young generation was very concerned about the world that the older generation was handing over to them, and that world was facing extreme environmental challenges.

Speaking of what The Rotary Foundation could do to safeguard the environment, he said the foundation was not a monolithic organisation and funded projects of local rotary clubs.

He explained that the Rotary Club of Karachi could join the respective clubs of Germany or South Africa to undertake a project related to environment. For instance, he said, there could be a project for funding solar panels in Pakistan, in which collective funding could come from the Pakistani Rotary clubs but also from Rotarians outside the country.

“Climate change may well be an existential threat to the globe,” he remarked, adding that water issues and certain diseases could also threaten the globe.

The Rotary Foundation funded projects, which local rotary clubs wanted to undertake to accomplish humanitarian aid, he explained.

Maloney is also a member of the law firm of Blackburn, Maloney and Schuppert, LLC, which focuses on taxation, estate planning and agricultural law. He represents large farming operations in the Southeastern and Midwestern United States and has chaired the American Bar Association’s Committee on Agriculture in the Section of Taxation.

When asked about his views on agricultural tax in Sindh, he said he viewed it as a political issue, and the Rotary Foundation had no involvement in political issues. He clarified that the Rotary was not going to get involved in supporting or not supporting any tax regime of any national or provincial government. “We are not going to get involved with the government on policies generally,” he explained.

He said that they could, however, assist farmers through different agricultural programmes. For example, he said, after the 2022 floods, the foundation undertook an agricultural programme with Baloch farmers to divert them from irrigating normal crop to irrigating organic crop. It was a micro-loan facility and most of the farmers repaid their loans after they had earned enough revenue to build their homes and send their children to school, he said.

He said the foundation also wanted to work on projects that local rotary clubs “identify as needed in their local communities.”

Speaking on polio eradication programmes in Pakistan, he said that they would advocate for funding such programmes globally. He added that malnourishment was also an issue that needed to be addressed for eradicating polio, as there had been cases in Sindh this year where fully polio-vaccinated children contracted the polio virus, mainly because they were malnourished. “Poor sanitation helps promote the spread of the polio virus environmentally,” he said.

The Rotary Foundation, he said, was going to continue providing funds for polio eradication. So far, he said, they had contributed US $460 million for polio eradication in Pakistan, of the total $2.2 billion that they collected globally. The foundation, he said, was coordinating with the Pakistani government, the World Health Organisation, and Unicef, in outlining the strategies to control the polio spread in the country.

He said the rotary clubs in Pakistan had worked for years to eradicate polio in the country and they had made great strides. After having only six cases last year and then to have 19 this year was discouraging, but compared to what the situation was 30 years back, “its a great improvement and we go to continue that improvement,” he remarked.