With no specific financial commitments made at this week’s international food summit in Rome, the international humanitarian agency, Church World Service (CWS), is urging world leaders to “trickle up” their previously made funding promises and put more of that money now on cost effective and relatively fast micronutrient programs to save tomorrow’s leaders — the world’s 200 million young children who are suffering and dying from malnutrition.
“It’s deeply discouraging that leading nations haven’t agreed to measurable commitments to world food security,” says Maurice Bloem of Church World Service, the US-based churches’ international development organisation.
“The fact is that world bodies can multi-task with the funding they’ve already promised — by dealing now with the immediate global crisis of childhood malnutrition at the same time they’re addressing longer term solutions like sustainable agriculture.”
The alternative, says Bloem, CWS Deputy Director and Head of Programmes for the NGO, “is to lose the longer term altogether, literally, in the bodies of a lost generation of future citizens and leaders - those children who now may fail to develop healthily, both physically and mentally, or, worse, who may die from malnutrition and disease.”
At the Rome Summit, the United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, said that of the 1 billion people on the planet who do not have enough to eat, more than 17,000 children die of starvation every day - one every five seconds.
According to a report issued last week by the United Nations Children’s Fund, 8.8 million children under the age of five die each year from largely preventable causes and one-third of those who die are malnourished.
“We need to put food security and nutrition security hand in hand,” CWS’s Bloem says.
Bloem, whose agency supports sustainable agriculture programs in poor countries, says “It’s good that food summit participants are committing to greater development of local sustainable agriculture, because so far there has been a conspicuous lack on the action side of such promises.
“But world leaders need also to look at the cost benefits and rapid return on investment in treating child and maternal malnutrition.
“It’s a lot faster to provide and see results from increased maternal education that encourages breastfeeding babies for at least their first six months. It’s also quicker to provide the relative bargain of micronutrients for children under five who are at risk due to nutritional deficiencies.”
Last week, Bloem attended the Copenhagen Consensus conference on nutrition in New York, where Professor Sue Horton of the University of Waterloo in Canada told government officials, nutrition experts, researchers, donor groups, non-governmental agencies and the private sector, “For a small investment we could make malnutrition yesterday’s problem.”
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), vitamin A, iron and iodine are the most important micronutrients in global public health terms, particularly for children and pregnant women in poor countries. WHO estimates that providing vitamin A every four to six months for children aged six months to five years could reduce mortality by 23 per cent in at risk regions.
Helen Keller International has estimated that the cost of delivering sufficient vitamin A supplements is about $1 per year, per child. Small packets of multivitamin and mineral powders for moderately malnourished small children cost about [US] three cents each and are added to foods the children already eat.
CWS’s Bloem says: “Although we realise that financial analyses are only part of the discussion on food security and malnutrition, they are an important part of the discussion. Given present economic realities worldwide, the question is, ‘How can we continue to have the biggest impact on maternal and child health with the resources we have?’”
In Rome, leaders attending this week’s food summit — minus the Group of Eight except for Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, whose country is hosting the event - are excoriating the world’s wealthiest nations for deepening world hunger by permitting speculation in agricultural markets and continuing the use of subsidies which hurt production in developing countries.
In the food summit’s final declaration, approved in the opening session on 16 November 2009, countries have agreed to increase significantly their pledges for aid to agriculture, though without a specific dollar commitment.
“Pledges are fine, if they are made real,” says Bloem, “And, yes, smallholder farmers should be supported, but please don’t forget that 75 per cent of the world’s poorest don’t grow their own food. They have to buy it.”
He says action to address food distribution issues and support for local agriculture cannot wait for a better economy, particularly in the event of another food crisis, as a growing group of economists are warning.
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