Children Face Food Crisis, U.N. Says

Despite a global decline in poverty in recent years, malnutrition plagues millions of the world’s children and is partly responsible for more than half of all child deaths each year, UNICEF warns in a report to be issued today in Paris.

Malnutrition is a factor in 55% of the estimated 12 million preventable deaths each year of children younger than 5, the agency says in its annual report on the state of the world’s children. To find a disease that killed children on a comparable scale, researchers had to reach back to the Middle Ages and the bubonic plague, termed the Black Death.

“It is an existing, silent emergency or silent crisis that literally has enormous implications worldwide,” said UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy in a Paris interview Monday. “This is not a one-time or special problem. . . . Virtually half of the children in South Asia and a third of the children in sub-Saharan Africa are malnourished.”

Besides child mortality, undernourishment often causes children to be born with low IQs or mental retardation and can be a factor in the deaths of mothers in childbirth, the report says. The deaths, disability and lost productivity due to malnutrition ripple through the economies of countries where hunger is most acute, and can reduce the gross national product by as much as 5%, researchers estimated, a figure that in Bangladesh and India alone would total $18 billion.

Economic expansion in recent years, particularly in developing countries in East Asia, has reduced malnutrition in some regions. The report cites the experience of Thailand, where the number of underweight children age 5 and younger dropped from 51% in 1982 to 19% in 1990. Other countries that have recorded significant reductions in child malnutrition include Niger, China, Tanzania, Morocco and most of Latin America, UNICEF noted.

The report also points to the widespread production and use of iodized salt in reducing mental impairment due to iodine deficiency and suggests there are other inexpensive steps that can be taken to fight malnutrition.

But Bellamy said, despite such strides, there is much more to be done. “The trend unfortunately in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa is . . . in the wrong direction,” she said. “In South Asia, in particular, there have been significant gains against severe malnutrition. So, realistically, fewer children are dying of malnutrition. But the problem of mild and moderate malnutrition is, if anything, growing.”

“The great majority of governments and leaders understand these issues,” she noted. “But they have to back that up with both the resources and the effort.”

Nor is malnutrition limited to the Third World, she said. The report mentions that an estimated 13 million American children younger than 12 go hungry for at least part of the year. Child hunger in the U.S. is “largely to be found near the end of the month, when the income of the family runs out or whatever financial assistance they are on begins to run out,” Bellamy said. “The amount of deaths attributable to malnutrition is probably less in the U.S. or the developed world, but certainly it is a condition that can be found worldwide.

“Americans or Europeans,” she added, “shouldn’t think these are just problems limited to far-off places in the world. Clearly, when you go to parts of New York City, Philadelphia and Los Angeles, and European locations as well, you can find children living in conditions that really are just horrible.”

But the report is devoted mainly to hunger in the Third World. It links child malnutrition to discrimination against women. Pregnant women who receive insufficient food or who are overworked give birth to malnourished and underweight babies. Girls often are given less food than boys in cultures that favor male children, and curtailed educational opportunities for girls deprive them of nutritional knowledge.

UNICEF specifies steps, most inexpensive, to reduce child malnutrition, including:

* Continuing to expand salt iodizing. Between 1990 and 1997, the estimated number of newborns threatened with mental disabilities caused by iodine deficiency dropped from 40 million to 28 million, due largely to the spread of salt iodizing.

* Fortifying diets with vitamin A, believed to bolster resistance to infection. Guatemala has experienced success fortifying sugar with vitamin A, and other nations hand it out in capsules.

* Fighting anemia, which is linked to reduced intelligence in infants and deaths of mothers in childbirth, with supplemental iron. Governments in Latin America and the Middle East have had success in reducing malnutrition by fortifying wheat products with iron.

* Providing support for community-based health care and broader primary education in underdeveloped countries. Such spending has reduced malnutrition in Thailand and other East Asian countries.

Bellamy said such programs show that foreign aid from the U.S. and other developed countries to the Third World can make a difference.

Dahlburg reported from Paris and Turner from the United Nations.