LONDON (AlertNet) - Preventing lifelong damage from malnutrition hinges on boosting efforts to tackle the problem in children under two, the head of the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) said on Friday.
WFP's executive director Josette Sheeran said the world's biggest humanitarian body was increasingly targeting under-twos in its fight to prevent malnutrition - responsible for more than a third of childhood deaths - and stunting, which afflicts nearly 200 million children in the developing world.
"We know if a child under two is deprived of adequate nutrition that the damage is irreversible and that the loss of brain and body development cannot be recovered," Sheeran told a briefing at the Royal Society of Medicine in London.
"We have prioritised those under two and increased eight-fold the numbers of under-twos and pregnant and lactating women we are reaching just in the past year, because we know if we miss that moment it cannot be recovered," she told an audience of doctors and aid workers.
Child undernutrition is the largest single contributor to child mortality, beating HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined, Sheeran said.
Meanwhile, malnutrition is responsible for 11 percent of the world's disease burden and can cost countries more than 10 percent of their gross domestic product, she added.
Sheeran said studies have shown that malnourished infants are likely to earn half the income of children in similar circumstances "whose only advantage was to have adequate nutrition before that second birthday".
She called on audience members to share their expertise and knowledge about nutrition to help develop food that would plug nutritional gaps. The quality and quantity of food production are growing concerns as increasingly unpredictable weather patterns threaten crops around the world.
WFP, which aims to feed about 10 percent of the world's 1 billion chronically hungry, is already distributing products like Plumpy'nut - a blend of peanuts, sugar, milk powder and oil fortified with vitamins and minerals.
"We have the knowledge, we have the understanding, we have the wherewithal and we just need ... to really turn the tide on some key issues like child malnutrition," Sheeran said. "In some ways it's just a failure of imagination and will (that we haven't)."
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