Ending malnutrition: World Food Day

Over the past twenty years the percentage of people who go to bed hungry has fallen from 24% to 14%. It is one of the success stories of our age.

On World Food Day, 16 October, I look at that success and ask – how can we use what we’ve learned to finish the job? Why should any of the remaining 842 million go hungry?

Children in the 1,000 days from conception to their second birthday are particularly susceptible to the lifelong effects of hunger. Malnutrition weakens their immune systems. It stunts their intellects and bodies. Lack of access to nutritious food is a factor in half of child deaths in the developing world and a meaningful percentage of physical impairments and disabilities.

Poor nutrition is part of a miserable cycle – people trapped in poverty cannot afford to grow or buy the right kinds of food for a healthy, reliable diet. And children who don’t get good food when they are young are more likely to grow up to be poor themselves.

Ethiopia stands out as a country that has already met its Millennium Development Goal target promise of cutting preventable child deaths by two-thirds. On my last trip there, I saw World Vision’s work in a relief feeding centre keeping all of a district’s children alive during a food emergency. I was also pleased to visit sustainable agriculture projects which are ensuring that far more people never reach that state of critical hunger.

“I don’t think I will need any more loans. Now I think I am doing well and I am satisfied that I can feed my children.”

In addition, I met a number of individuals who had received microfinance loans to create small businesses that provided some income to cushion their families from shocks like drought or family sickness. A mother called Abaynesh told me how two $160 loans from World Vision’s microfinance subsidiary, VisionFund, had enabled her to set up a business fattening calves for market. She told me, “I don’t think I will need any more loans. Now I think I am doing well and I am satisfied that I can feed my children.”

In some places, helping families to become reliably food secure requires ingenuity. “Farmer-managed natural regeneration” has emerged over the past several decades as a unique combination of traditional local knowledge and agricultural science where farmers and pastoralists restore trees to the landscape without actually having to plant them – regenerating them from living stumps, roots and seeds that lie dormant in the soil.

Now being promoted by World Vision in 14 countries from the Sahara in West Africa to arid East Africa, the approach has won many awards. In fact, just last month, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification recognised this work in its Land For Life awards, describing the scale of its impact as ‘phenomenal’.

With techniques like this, the annual “hungry period” when food supplies are nearly exhausted is shortened and the need for emergency food assistance and the deaths of malnourished children are significantly reduced. Instead, farmers can:

 stockpile grains during good years,

 harvest fruit and seeds for food and income from trees they have regenerated on their farms,

 use pruned branches for firewood; and

 improve the fertility of soils, reducing erosion, trapping more water in the soil and protecting young crops.