UK leads a global effort to tackle hunger and malnutrition

Abstract

A World Report in The Lancet this week highlights the food and malnutrition crisis in Yemen. Elsewhere, leading charities have warned that more than 1 million children in the Sahel region of west Africa are at risk of severe malnutrition. It was timely, therefore, that on the back of the euphoria of the London Olympics, the UK's Prime Minister, David Cameron, co-hosted a global hunger summit with the Vice President of Brazil, Michel Temer, to kickstart efforts to tackle undernutrition in children. Malnutrition is a neglected area globally. A study published in The Lancet last month showed that, in low-income and middle-income countries in 2011, 314 million children younger than 5 years were stunted and 258 million were underweight. As well as a global commitment to reduce child malnutrition by the Rio Olympics in 2016, measures announced at the summit included investment in drought-resistant and vitamin-enriched crops; a collaboration with Unilever, Syngenta, and GlaxoSmithKline to make nutritious food available to the poorest communities; and use of technology innovations to improve accountability across countries. Tackling malnutrition globally has been unacceptably slow. To date, donor approaches have focused mainly on agricultural issues and have not placed enough emphasis on human nutrition, especially during pregnancy and the first 2 years of life—a crucial period in a child's development. Key interventions such as improving diets of women before and during pregnancy, breastfeeding, complementary feeding, and fortification of foods for this high-risk period have not been sufficiently scaled up. Unfortunately, the summit's emphasis on technical fixes and partnering with the private sector might fall short unless it focuses on the needs of vulnerable groups. The determinants of malnutrition—inequity, women's nutrition and empowerment, food distribution and pricing systems, conflict and emergencies, and climate change—need addressing. Next year, The Lancet will publish a Series on maternal and child nutrition which will cover these and other issues, and hopefully pave the way towards integration of agriculture, nutrition, and food security so that the global malnutrition problem can be tackled head on. Yemen's hunger crisisPolitical instability and soaring food prices have exacerbated the health problems for Yemen's already impoverished and malnourished population. Talha Khan Burki reports. Full-Text PDF