LONDON: Some 165 million children worldwide are stunted by malnutrition as babies and face a future of ill health, poor education, low earnings and poverty, the head of the United Nations children’s fund said yesterday.
Anthony Lake, executive director of Unicef, said the problem of malnutrition is vastly under-appreciated, largely because poor nutrition is often mistaken for a lack of food. In reality, he said, malnutrition and its irreversible health consequences also affect relatively well-off countries, such as India where there is plenty of food, but access to it is unequal and nutritional content can be low. “Undernutrition, and especially stunting, is one of the least recognised crises for children in the world,” Lake said.
Stunting is the consequence of undernutrition in the first 1,000 or so days of a baby’s life, including during gestation. Stunted children learn less in school and are more likely themselves to live in poverty and go on to have children also stunted by poor nutrition. These in turn increase poverty in affected countries and regions, and drive greater gaps between the rich and the poor, Lake said.
“The numbers are phenomenal. In India, for example, about 48 percent of children are stunted, and in Yemen it’s almost 60 percent. Just think of the drag on development,” Lake said.
Lake spoke in London ahead of a “Nutrition for Growth” summit today co-hosted by the British and Brazilian governments and the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation. The summit coincides with the publication in The Lancet, which found that as well as the 165 million children stunted by poor nutrition, nearly half of all deaths among under fives — 3.1 million deaths a year — are caused by malnutrition. Reuters
