Its chairman, Yeo Bee Yin (PH-Puchong), said milk is an effective and affordable source of nutrients essential for healthy growth.
“Stunting is not just about physical height. It has serious effects on a child’s brain structure and function.
“Children affected by stunting have smaller overall brain volume, fewer neurons and weaker neural connections, which can affect IQ, language skills and concentration,” she said when presenting the committee’s statement in the Dewan Rakyat today.
Yeo said the 2022 National Health and Morbidity Survey found that the stunting rate among children under five rose to 21.2%, up from 17.7% in 2015, and that Malaysia was recently reported to be the only Asean country to see an increase in stunting between 2000 and 2024.
Unlike cooking oil and sugar, she said, milk has not received the same level of subsidy.
Yeo said the committee believed the finance; agriculture and food security; domestic trade and cost of living; and health ministries should review subsidies to make milk a priority.
The committee also recommended mandatory growth monitoring for children under five and extend nutrition and health interventions from the first 1,000 days of life to 2,000 days, covering children up to five years old.
“The committee found that stunting becomes harder to detect after 18 months, once routine immunisation ends, until children enter kindergarten at age five.
“As such, the health ministry is recommended to make nutritional consultations compulsory at six, 12 and 18 months at both government and private health facilities,” she said.
In addition, the committee proposed intensifying public awareness campaigns to improve parents’ nutrition literacy and called for faster implementation of mandatory front-of-pack labelling (Nutri-Grade A-D) on food and beverage products.
Yeo pointed to Indonesia as a model, which reduced its stunting rate by 11 percentage points in six years, from 30.8% in 2018 to 19.8% in 2024, supported by a national initiative under Presidential Regulation No. 72 of 2021.
The committee also recommended that the legal affairs division, together with the health ministry, study the need for a similar legal mandate to tackle stunting in Malaysia.