Hunger, malnutrition kill 5 million children a year_11005

Posted: 1/07/05

Hunger, malnutrition kill 5 million children a year

By Peggy Polk

Religion News Service

ROME (RNS)–Hunger and malnutrition kill more than 5 million children a year and cost developing countries billions of dollars in lost productivity and national income, a United Nations report asserts.

“The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2004,” issued by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, estimated the number of hungry people in the world at 852 million in 2000-2002, up by 18 million from the mid-1990s.

The total includes 815 million people in developing countries, 28 million in countries in transition from communism and 9 million in industrialized countries, the report said.

Unless the international community changes its priorities, the world will not meet the target set by the World Food Summit in 1996 of halving the number of the hungry by 2015, the annual report said.

“And this is already a modest goal. We should be eliminating hunger,” said Hartwig de Haen, assistant FAO director-general for economic and social development. He accused industrialized countries of failing to provide the development aid they have pledged.

Contending that investing in the fight against hunger makes economic sense, the report estimated the direct costs of dealing with damage caused by hunger are roughly $30 billion a year.

This is more than “five times the amount committed so far to the global fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria,” it said. “Conversely, every dollar invested in reducing hunger can yield from five to 20 times as much in benefits.”

“Under-nourishment and deficiencies in essential vitamins and minerals cost more than 5 million children their lives every year,” the report said.

In addition, it said, they “cost households in the developing world more than 220 million years of productive life from family members whose lives are cut short or impaired by disabilities related to malnutrition, and cost developing countries billions of dollars in lost productivity and consumption.”

The report urged a “twin-track approach” to fighting hunger–helping the poor increase their ability to produce food or earn income to buy it, while giving immediate aid to the most needy families. It recommended large-scale national programs to promote agriculture and rural development.

Under this strategy, 31 countries with a total population of 2.2 billion people–nearly half the population of the developing world–reduced their percentage of hungry people by at least 25 percent during the 1990s and have made “significant progress” toward the millennium goal, the report said.