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World Nutrition and Poverty Eradication

This is the 2007 draft on nutrition and poverty. You will get the newest version here.

World Nutrition

Sufficient food is needed for childhood growth, learning abilities, physical work, pregnancy, lactation, and resisting and recovering from disease. Chronic hunger leads to undernutrition, which is associated with a much higher risk of severe diseases (like malaria, diarrhoea or pneumonia). This risk is also raised by malnutrition, because of the lack of specific nutrients like zinc, iron, or vitamin A.

Affected people and foundations of life: Even though there is enough food for everyone, 856 million people suffer chronic hunger, most of them in less developed countries (FAO [Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations] 2007, 193).

Deaths: roughly 7 million per year, among them 5.1 million children under the age of 5 years.
5.1 million (i. e. 52,5%) of the 9.7 million preventable deaths of children under 5 in low- and middle-income countries annually are attributable to undernutrition (UNICEF [United Nations Children's Fund] 2007 and 2007a; UNICEF et al. [and others] 2007, 29; WFP [World Food Programme] 2006, 3; WHO [World Health Organization] 2005, 106; Caulfield et al. 2004, 195). These 5.1 million cases of under-5-mortality represent 70-75% of all death cases related to undernutrition, amounting to 6.8-7.3 million children and adults per year (WFP 2004, 4; The Hunger Project).

Loss of healthy life-years: 138 million healthy life-years annually (DALYs [Disability-adjusted life years], attributable to underweight as a risk factor for diseases; WHO 2002, 228).

Targets/goals: The UN (United Nations) World Food Summit and the UN Millennium Declaration pledged the target to halve the number resp. (respectively) the proportion of undernourished people from 1990 to 2015:

reducing the number of undernourished people to half their present level no later than 2015 (adopted by the World Food Summit: FAO 1996; emphasis added)
to halve, by the year 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger (Millennium Target: UN 2000, § 19.1; emphasis added).

Because population growth affects the proportion, but not the number of the poor, the first target is the more ambitious one (FAO 2006, 4).

Trend: 0 Within the last three decades, hunger-related death cases have been successfully reduced from around 41 000 to about 18 500 per day (The Hunger Project; sources quoted above). But in the last years the numbers have stagnated. The proportion of the hungry is in fact declining, but their number is not. Until 2015 the Millennium Target could be reached, but the World Food Summit Target may not, as projections show. (FAO 2006, 4.)

Measures: Measures are to be continued and intensified, e. g. (for example) school meal programmes, food for work projects, providing access to productive resources such as land, water, seeds, knowledge, and credit, as well as combating environmental threats to food security. To assist 83 million beneficiaries in 2008 the UN World Food Programme has requested US$ (United States Dollar) 3.9 billion (WFP 2006a, 5).

Poverty Eradication

Poverty means insufficient conditions for survival, health and social inclusion. It is a main cause of hunger and other global challenges.

Affected people and foundations of life: 2.7 billion people in the global South are living below the UN poverty line of an income or consumption level of US$ 2 per day (WB [World Bank] 2007a and 2004, 1), and 980 million below US$ 1 per day, which is the line for extreme poverty (UN 2007, 6). Most of them are women. (More exactly, the extreme poverty line is US$ 1.08 a day, measured in terms of 1993 purchasing power parity; UN 2007, 6). As a risk factor, income poverty (below US$ 2 a day) has strong associations with inadequate water and/or sanitation (36-51%), underweight children (23-37%) and indoor air pollution (WHO 2004a, 2068f. [and following]). Broader concepts of poverty include not only income, but also food insecurity, lack of access to health services and education, unemployment, etc. (and so on) In this scope the yearly death toll of 9.7 million children under 5 (UNICEF 2007) is often considered as attributed to poverty, as well as adults death cases in the less developed world caused by diseases, that are preventable by basic health interventions. Many of the global challenges described in this survey can be seen as related to poverty as the underlying, but not very specific issue (largely overlapping with other issues).

Targets/goals: to halve the proportion of people living in extreme poverty from 1990 to 2015 (Millennium Target: UN 2000, § 19.1).

Trend: + The number of the poor is declining. The Millennium Target will probably be met on a global scale, but not in each country (WB 2006a, 66). Under-5-mortality is declining, too (UNICEF 2007a).

Measures: Poverty reduction strategies should be continued or intensified, for example microcredits especially for women, fair trade, and employment initiatives especially for young people.

Annotations

For numeric names the short scale is used:
1 billion = one thousand million = 10⁹ = 1 000 000 000

DALYs: Disability-adjusted life years.
One DALY represents the loss of one year of equivalent full health. DALYs are the sum of the years of life lost due to premature mortality (YLL) in the population and the years lost due to disability (YLD) for incident cases of the health condition. (WHO 2004, 95f.)

Sources

Caulfield et al. 2004 – Laura E. Caulfield, Mercedes de Onis, Monika Blössner, and Robert E. Black: Undernutrition as an underlying cause of child deaths associated with diarrhea, pneumonia, malaria, and measles. In: American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol. 80, No. 1, 193-198 (July 2004).
FAO 1996 – Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, World Food Summit: Rome Declaration and Plan of Action.
FAO 2006 – Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2006.
FAO 2007 – Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: State of Food and Agriculture 2007.
The Hunger Project: Decline in the number of hunger related deaths. (No date of publication given [probably in the late 1990s], retrieved in 2006.)
UN 2000 – United Nations, General Assembly: United Nations Millennium Declaration.
UN 2007 – United Nations: The Millennium Development Goals Report 2007. [Published by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs DESA – June 2007.]
UNICEF 2007 – United Nations Children's Fund: Under five deaths by cause 2006.
UNICEF 2007a – United Nations Children's Fund: Child deaths fall below 10 million for first time. (Press release.)
UNICEF et al. 2007 – United Nations Children's Fund, World Health Organization, The World Bank and United Nations Population Division: Levels and Trends of Child Mortality in 2006. Estimates developed by the Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation. Draft version. New York, December 2007.
WB 2004 – World Bank: How have the world s poorest fared since the early 1980s? By Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion (World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3341, June 2004).
WB 2006a – World Bank: World Development Report 2006.
WB 2007a – World Bank: Understanding Poverty. (No date of publication given, retrieved in 2007.)
WFP 2004 – World Food Programme: Jahresbericht 2004.
WFP 2006 – World Food Programme: Ending Child Hunger and Undernutrition Initiative; Global Framework for Action: Summary Note; Informal Consultation on the Ending Child Hunger and Undernutrition Initiative (ECHUI). Rome, 9 October 2006.
WFP 2006a – World Food Programme: 2006 Estimated Needs and Shortfalls for WFP Operational Activities. 1 November 2006.
WHO 2002 – World Health Organization: The World Health Report 2002 – Reducing Risks, Promoting Healthy Life.
WHO 2004 – World Health Organization: WHO Report 2004.
WHO 2004a – World Health Organization: Comparative Quantification of Health Risks.
WHO 2005 – World Health Organization: The World Health Report 2005 – Make every mother and child count.

Draft (2007)