Every year, 3.5 million mothers and children below five years of age die in the poorest countries because they did not have the nutrition they needed to fight common diseases. Three-quarters of them could have survived diarrhea or malaria if they had been properly nourished.
For those who do survive, the future looks grim: all studies show that children who are undernourished in the first two years of life suffer health problems and lag in development for the rest of their lives. It impedes their capacity to learn, fitness to work, and their ability to develop their talents. If these first two years go wrong, the impacts are felt a lifetime.
The issue is not severe and acute malnutrition which hits populations suddenly, usually the result of governments in conflict. The question is how we attract the attention of the European Union and the G8 countries to the malnutrition that experts call ‘hidden hunger’, and which affects one in every three people worldwide. It is caused by imbalanced nutrition or a lack of vitamins and essential minerals that enable the growth and maintain the vital functions of the human being.
Take for example vitamin A. We can avoid the death of at least one million children, every year, by improving their vitamin A status. Recent data show that even moderate deficiency of this vitamin results in higher mortality. In many developing countries, the provision of this vitamin can reduce child deaths. Besides the human suffering, the economic costs of malnutrition are huge: according to the World Bank, the countries where malnutrition is most prevalent lose, on average, between 2 and 3 per cent of their GDP.
Yet, solutions exist. Humans added essential nutrients since time immemorial to their foods; and food fortification – adding vitamins or minerals to commonly-used foods - has been a major government policy in developed countries to improve public health since the beginning of the 20th century. All scientific studies of such interventions prove that the addition of vitamins or minerals to basic foodstuffs reduces deficiencies and improves public health.
Chili promoted the addition of iron to milk, resulting in a 66 per cent reduction of anemia amongst babies. The fortification of maize meal with folic acid in South Africa – one of the projects supported by the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition - was followed by a 40 per cent reduction in spina bifida, a serious deformation of the neural tube in new-born babies.
Moreover, these essential interventions cost little and deliver a lot: to enrich cooking oil with vitamin A costs less than 1 dollar cent per liter, and fortification in general has a benefit to cost ratio of at least 8 to 1.
What is missing is the willingness to act. At GAIN, we are convinced that there is an urgent need to fight malnutrition if the world wants to achieve the Millennium Development Goal to reduce poverty and hunger by half, by 2015. Fighting malnutrition is the first step to reach this objective. Science has demonstrated the cost-effectiveness of fortification, and the technologies and know-how are available in the private sector, which has the capacity to innovate and deliver products to the poorest.
Europe and the G8 have to act. Not only do they need to make the fight against malnutrition a policy priority, they must also invest. The equation is straight-forward: 160 million euro for fortification programs could improve the health of 1 billion people. To put that amount into perspective, the regular move between Brussels and Strasbourg of EU institutions costs 200 million euro per year.
While the latter is an understandable expense historically, the time has come for the EU and G8 to make different political choices that help keep 3.5 million mothers and children alive and well.
