More than 300 million children in poor nations are chronically malnourished. The condition can lead to tragic irreversible mental stunting and lower IQs, and it can impair capacity to learn, a report by the World Food Programme says.
Each year almost six million children under 5 years “die of factors linked directly to undernutrition,” the report says, adding that hunger causes widespread physical and mental damage in the children who survive. According to UN expert bodies, about 135.5 million underweight preschool children have mental damage, and about 32% are moderately or severely stunted and may never achieve their full mental capacity. Moreover, when children make it to school, short term hunger can affect their attention span, making it hard to learn.
“Hungry children become damaged adults with limited opportunities and capacities, who end up having hungry children of their own,” concludes the study, Hunger and Learning .
But it argues that targeted interventions can reverse the vicious cycle linking learning and hunger.
“This can be reversed but it requires not only resources but the political will to recognise that an investment in nutrition and education is an investment in development,” said Sheila Sisulu, the programme’s deputy executive director.
She said there were examples from countries such as Jamaica, Mali, Chile, and Thailand, where policy decisions resulted in a reversal to a downward trend in malnutrition levels.
In Chile, chronic malnutrition levels fell from 60% in 1950 to 1.7% in 2004, Ms Sisulu noted.
Mali also managed to reduce undernutrition in parts of the country from 46% down to 31% by making information available via door to door campaigns in villages on improving nutritional practices, including correcting vitamin deficiencies.
There also needs to be a commitment that education and learning are “more than just buildings and books,” she stressed. “It’s also about feeding the mind, so the mind can in fact take advantage of what is taught.”
Some simple and tested interventions suggested include ensuring that proper weight is reached in early childhood through food supplements; micronutrient fortification and supplementation; antenatal care; exclusive breastfeeding for six months; and postnatal care.
Possible interventions at school age include school feeding; take home rations; scholarships to poor families to pay for the costs of sending children to school and reduced fees; and providing deworming drugs to children in school.
The programme cautions that, although poverty levels have in many cases improved, they have remained the same, or become worse in others.
This, says Ms Sisulu, underscores the fact that issues of hunger and malnutrition “cannot be left to other improvements,” to address the problem and require targeted efforts. Data compiled show that despite the robust economic growth in 1995-2003, India had 55.3 million malnourished children under 5 years of age—the world’s largest number of cases. Moreover, in the same period, Mexico had 836 000, Brazil 950 000, Turkey 589 000, Indonesia 5.9 million, and Pakistan 8.7 million.
In the same period, the Democratic Republic of the Congo was estimated to have 3.1 million malnourished children, Ethiopia 5.8 million, Sudan, 1.9 million, Niger 1 million, and Uganda 1.2 million.
The report, Hunger and Learning , is available at www.wfp.org/whs.