Malnutrition: multiplier effect

AFTER the global economy was jolted by the worst recession since World War II last year and the food and fuel crises in 2008, a report jointly published by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) claimed that while developing countries are on track to achieve the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) on poverty, the goal to reduce hunger may not be met by 2015.
The “Global Monitoring Report 2010: The MDGs after the Crisis” projects that the number of extreme poor could reach around 920 million by 2015, which marks a significant decline from the 1.8 billion people living in extreme poverty in 1990.
However, the MDG target of halving the proportion of people who suffer from hunger by 2015 from the 1990 baseline “appears very unlikely to be met” due to the food- price crisis in 2008 and the global financial crisis.
“Both the 2008 food-price crisis and the financial crisis that hit that year have played a role in exacerbating hunger in the developing world. The critical MDG target of halving the proportion of people suffering from hunger from 1990 to 2015 appears very unlikely to be met as over a billion people struggle to meet basic food needs,” the World Bank and IMF said in a joint press statement.
The World Bank and IMF report stated that malnutrition among children and pregnant women have multiplier effects. About a third of diseases of children under five and 20-percent maternal deaths, the World Bank and IMF said, are caused by malnutrition.
World Bank projections said that for the period from 2009 to the end of 2015, around 1.2 million more deaths might occur among children under five due to crisis-related causes.
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