Report: Global targets for better nutrition are not only stalled, but worsening


Chris Herlinger | April 23, 2012

A mother provides a ready-to-use therapeutic food at a feeding center in Kenya. Photo: Chris Herlinger/CWS

A mother provides a ready-to-use therapeutic food at a feeding center in Kenya. Photo: Chris Herlinger/CWS

New York – For humanitarian agencies like CWS, the news that the spike in world food prices is worsening the outlook for improved nutrition globally is neither pleasant nor surprising.

A new report says that progress toward better nutrition and food security is stalled – and getting worse.

Jos Verbeek, the lead economist at the World Bank and chief author of the Global Monitoring Report 2012, said Monday (April 23) that rising food prices are a key culprit and that the increases come at a time of progress on other United Nations Millennium Development Goals.

In releasing the report, Verbeek said the combination of decreasing development assistance, increasing population growth and higher food prices will make nutrition programs for the world’s poor more necessary than ever.

“According to our projections, an estimated 1.02 billion people will still be living in extreme poverty in 2015. Clearly, assistance must be leveraged in new ways if we are to improve food security and nutrition, particularly for the poor and vulnerable,” Verbeek said.

Among the key findings of the report:

  • The increase in food prices in 2008 and 2011 has kept millions in poverty. People are stuck because they are spending huge portions of their income on food.
  • Worse, the increase in food prices is making more people poor. The food price increases of 2007-08 increased the numbers of the global poor by 95.6 million, and those of 2010-11 by 36 million.
  • Higher food prices have worsened the problem of undernourishment. As a result, progress towards the Millenium Development Goals linked to food and nutrition is faltering.

At a meeting in Washington with members of the humanitarian alliance InterAction, also attended by CWS Director of Advocacy Martin Shupack, Verbeek said the food price spike “prevents people from escaping poverty.”

“The increase affects not only the quantity of food but the quality.”

While he is not a nutritionist, Verbeek was struck by data that confirms what nutrition experts (and humanitarians) have stressed for some time: that proper nutrition in the first 1,000 days of life is crucial to a child’s wellbeing. If not, “the damage in the first 1,000 days is irreversible and can’t be changed. That needs to sink in with people.”

As an economist, he said the data showing the importance of nutrition in infancy “was eye-opening.”

Multiply the problem times millions of children and you have a situation in which malnutrition “affects long-term development,” he said. From the standpoint of a “cost-benefit” analysis, countries that are tending to childhood nutrition are likely to prosper more than those which do not.

The data show that “malnutrition is not just a result of poverty but is a cause of it,” said Jennifer Rigg, director of policy and partnerships at the 1,000 Days partnership. “We need and must address this issue of malnutrition.”