5 children starve to death every minute

Five children around the world die every minute because of chronic malnutrition, according to a report that also said almost half a billion children are at risk of permanent damage over the next 15 years.

A report from Save the Children said the deaths of two million children each year could be prevented if malnutrition were better addressed. The report called chronic malnutrition a largely hidden crisis that affects one-in-four children.

Global hunger has fallen markedly over the last two decades, but the 2011 Global Hunger Index found that six countries have higher rates of hunger today than two decades ago.

Five of those countries are in Africa. The other is North Korea.

The 2011 Global Hunger Index said Congo, Burundi, Comoros, Swaziland and Ivory Coast have higherlevels of hunger today than in 1990. Kuwait, Turkey, Malaysia and Mexico have made the biggest gains against hunger.

Karin Lapping, a senior director of nutrition for Save the Children, said many Asian countries have made strides against hunger because of an explicit focus on reducing chronic malnutrition, but that many African countries have not made that same commitment and have fallen victims to predictable cycles of drought and famine.

“When we look at successful examples in Asia like Bangladesh, they have a national nutrition programme,” Lapping said. “We haven’t seen that to be the case in many nations in Africa.”

Ethiopia is one exception, she said, because of successful nutrition programmes. But, she said, in many other regions “progress has been undercut by cyclical emergencies like what we’re seeing now in the Sahel”, a belt across northern Africa that is experiencing a food crisis. Lapping said many African countries need greater political commitments from their governments and more external aid.

Malnutrition numbers in Africa remain startling. The report said that nearly two in five children on the continent — 60 million children — are stunted. The average yield of staple cereals is a third less than in Asia.

The British government estimates between 50,000 and 100,000 people died during a famine in Somalia last year. Most of those killed were children.

Chronic hunger leaves children vulnerable to starvation when food crises hit, but also leaves them vulnerable to death by diarrhoea, pneumonia and malaria even in better times.

“It also likely causes permanent damage to their bodies and brains,” said Tanya Weinberg, a Save the Children spokeswoman.

Meanwhile, UN aid chiefs meeting in Rome said the drought-stricken Sahel region of West Africa needed €550 million this year, warning the situation was “urgent”. The European Commission announced at the talks it was donating €30m to support feeding programmes for one million children under the age of two and half a million pregnant women and breast-feeding mothers.