Nearly 200 million children in poor countries have stunted growth because of insufficient nutrition, a new report published by UNICEF said before a three-day international summit on world hunger.
The head of a UN food agency, meanwhile, called on the world to join him in a day of fasting ahead of the summit to highlight the plight of 1 billion hungry people.
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Director-General Jacques Diouf said on Wednesday he hoped the fast would encourage action by world leaders who will take part in the meeting at his agency's headquarters starting on Monday.
The UN Children's Fund published a report saying that nearly 200 million children under five in poor countries were stunted by a lack of nutrients in their food.
More than 90 percent of those children live in Africa and Asia and more than one-third of all deaths in that age group are linked to undernutrition, UNICEF said.
While progress has been made in Asia — rates of stunted growth dropped from 44 percent in 1990 to 30 percent last year — there has been little success in Africa. There, the rate of stunted growth was about 38 percent in 1990. Last year, the rate was about 34 percent.
South Asia is a particular hotspot for the problem, with just Afghanistan, Nepal, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan accounting for 83 million hungry children under five.
“Unless attention is paid to addressing the causes of child and maternal undernutrition today, the costs will be considerably higher tomorrow,” UNICEF Executive Director Ann Veneman said in a statement.
Diouf said he would begin a 24-hour fast tomorrow morning. The agency also launched an online petition against world hunger through a Web page featuring a video with Diouf counting from one to six to remind visitors that every six seconds a child dies from hunger.
The UN children's agency called for more strategies like vitamin A supplementation and breast-feeding to be promoted more widely. That could cut the death rate in children by up to 15 percent, UNICEF said.
Not everyone agreed.
“It is unrealistic to believe malnutrition can be addressed by any top-down UN scheme,” said Philip Stevens of the International Policy Network — a London-based think tank. “The progress UNICEF's report points to in improving nutrition is almost certainly a result of economic growth, not UN strategies.”
The Rome-based FAO said earlier this year that hunger now affects a record 1.02 billion people globally, or one in six, with the financial meltdown, high food prices, drought and war blamed.
The agency hopes its World Summit on Food Security, with Pope Benedict XVI and about 60 heads of state so far expected to attend, will endorse a new strategy to combat hunger, focusing on increased investment in agricultural development for poor countries.
The long-term increase in the number of hungry is largely tied to reduced aid and private investments earmarked for agriculture since the mid-1980s, FAO said.
Countries like Brazil, Nigeria and Vietnam that have invested in their small farmers and rural poor are bucking the hunger trend, Diouf told the news conference.
They are among 31 countries that have reached or are on track to meet the goal set by world leaders nine years ago to cut the number of hungry people in half by 2015, he said.
“Eradicating hunger is no pipe dream,” Diouf said. “The battle against hunger can be won.”
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