GralInt-Fighting under-nutrition

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Fighting under-nutrition


Food for thought


Jun 7th 2013, 23:29 by C. H. | NEW YORK

BRITAIN and Brazil will pay host to meeting (http://nutrition4growth.org/) on hunger on June 8th, to build support for nutrition programmes ahead of the G8 summit in Northern Ireland this month. There has been the usual flurry of supportive press releases, as well as a nutrition series (http://www.thelancet.com/series/maternal-and-child-nutrition) in the Lancet and an announcement (http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2013/06/06/world-bank-group-scales-up-support-for-global-nutrition-programs-in-response-to-stunting-crisis-food-price-volatility) from the World Bank on June 6th that it would nearly triple its spending on maternal and childhood nutrition, to $600m in 2013 and 2014. All this is promising. But there remains much work to be done and, more troubling, squabbles over who should do it.

Fighting under-nutrition is an economic imperative as well as a moral one. Five years ago the Lancet brought new attention (http://www.thelancet.com/series/maternal-and-child-undernutrition) to the 1,000 days from conception to a child’s second birthday—poor nutrition in this period can lead to cognitive and physical problems that last for life. The accompanying drop in productivity saps a country’seconomic growth by more than 8%?


Robert Black of Johns Hopkins University now reports in the Lancet that the prevalence of stunting in young children in poor and middle-income countries dropped from 40% in 1990 to 32% in 2005 to 26% in 2011. But under-nutrition still accounts for nearly half of all deaths of children younger than five, or 3.1m deaths in 2011.

There are ways to help, for example, by providing food at schools, seeds and fertilisers for farming families and supplements for pregnant and lactating women. The Scaling Up Nutrition (http://scalingupnutrition.org/about) framework, launched in 2009, has helped propel nutrition programmes in 40 countries.

Presumably the private sector has an important role to play in all this—indeed the name of the June 8th meeting is “Nutrition for growth: beating hunger through business and science.” The World Health Organisation recommends exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months of life, followed by breastfeeding and food up to age two. The source of this complementary food, however, is still unclear. Urban mothers, in particular, might appreciate fortified food products for infants older than six months.

But the role of food companies remains hugely controversial, thanks to a decades-long fight over formula. In 1981 concern over low rates of breastfeeding prompted the World Health Assembly to adopt the International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes (http://www.who.int/nutrition/publications/infantfeeding/9241541601/en/) . Inadequate breastfeeding continues to be a top concern. The Lancet reckons it is responsible for the death of 800,000 young children each year. In March the Access to Nutrition Index (http://www.accesstonutrition.org/index-2013) , which judges food companies on their global nutrition policies, praised Nestlé and Danone for developing fortified products but highlighted charges by the International Baby Food Action Network, an advocacy group, that the companies were improperly marketing breast-milk substitutes. Nestlé, in particular, has denied this vigourously. The more things change, unfortunately, the more they stay the same.



Source: www.economist.com