News Release
April 11, 2000

World Nutrition Making Little Progress

WASHINGTON, D.C., April 11, 2000–Unnecessary and unacceptable levels of malnutrition and human deprivation will persist in the developing world unless concrete actions to combat these problems begin to accelerate now, say the United Nations Administrative Committee on Coordination's sub-Committee on Nutrition (ACC/SCN) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

The two organizations released today the 4th Report on the World Nutrition Situation: Nutrition Throughout the Life Cycle, which shows that current trends in human nutrition, unless changed, will condemn many countries to escalating health burdens and drastically limit their broader development prospects. It is not commonly known that if all the world's undernourished were gathered together, they would amount to as many people as now live in all of the Americas, and would be the third most populous country after China and India. Moreover, there are more malnourished pre-schoolers in developing countries than there are pre-schoolers in all of Europe and North America combined.

The 4th Report highlights the scope of the malnutrition problem, particularly among women and children, and stresses the need to create partnerships between governments and nongovermental organizations. "What this report shows so clearly is that the life cycle of good nutrition begins during fetal life," said Per Pinstrup-Andersen, IFPRI's director general.

The new report shows that 30 million children in the developing world are born undernourished each year. As many of these children grow they will join an estimated 182 million preschool children under five who are already stunted. Today, it is estimated that 27 percent of preschool children in developing countries are underweight. South Central Asia is the worst affected region, with some 44 percent of children affected. In Sub-Saharan Africa, 8.2 million more children are underweight now than in 1990.

Besides fetal and child undernutrition the report highlights several other nutrition trends that continue to impede proper mental, physical, and social development. The report emphasizes that while the world is becoming more aware of the effect of poor nutrition on overall development, worldwide trends such as globalization of trade, urbanization, and the spread of HIV/AIDS pose tremendous challenges to human nutrition. The report stresses the importance of anticipating these problems more coherently in order to ameliorate nutrition issues in advance.

The report calls for better data and more consistent methods for collecting information on the nutrition situation of the developing world's population throughout the life cycle, both within and across generations.

"Investing in maternal and child nutrition will have both short-and long-term benefits of huge economic and social significance, including reduced health care costs and increased intellectual capacity and adult productivity," said Stuart Gillespie, a research fellow at IFPRI. "No economic analysis can fully capture the benefits of such sustained mental, physical and social development."

The 4th Report on the World Nutrition Situation: Nutrition Throughout the Life Cycle, jointly published by ACC/SCN and IFPRI, was launched at the 27th annual meeting of the ACC/SCN held at World Bank headquarters in Washington, hosted in collaboration with UNICEF. It can be ordered from the ACCSCN Secretariat: c/o World Health Organization, 20 Avenue Appia, CH 1211 Geneva 27, Switzerland. Telephone: +41-22-798-8891 OR download/view the report or the highlights here.

Report (5.5MB)

Highlights (141K)

IFPRI is a Washington, D.C.-based, internationally funded organization established in 1975 to identify and analyze policies for meeting the food needs of the developing world. IFPRI conducts research on ways to achieve sustainable food production and optimize land use, improve food consumption and income levels of the poor, enhance the efficiency of markets and links between agriculture and other sectors of the economy, and improve trade and macroeconomic conditions.

The ACC/SCN serves as the UN focal point for harmonizing nutrition policies and strategies throughout the UN system, and to strengthen collaboration with partners for accelerated and more effective action against malnutrition. The UN members of the SCN are the ADB, FAO, IAEA, IFAD, ILO, UN, UNAIDS, UNDP, UNEP, UNESCO, UNFPA, UNHCR, UNICEF, UNRISD, UNU, WFP, WHO and the World Bank. From the outset, representatives if bilateral donor agencies and GOs have participated actively in the SCN.

For more information, please contacts:
Don Lippincott, (202) 862-5670, or David Gately, (202) 862-5679.