Never more than today, on the occasion of World Food Day, is it important to remember that the number of people suffering from hunger has increased for the first time in 10 years.
815 million people around the world suffer from hunger and even today 3 million children die every year for reasons related to malnutrition. The causes of hunger are man-made and we know perfectly well what they are: poverty, social inequality, conflict and migration, human rights violations, gender inequality, climate change, inadequate agricultural policies, land grabbing and state failure. But if humankind is capable of generating hunger, it can also stop it.
On one hand, solutions for treating malnutrition exist, are effective and low-cost. Action Against Hunger was the first humanitarian organisation, in 1997 in Chad, to successfully test ready-to-use therapeutic food, a highly nutritious food that requires no water (often contaminated) for preparation. A single packet costs just 25 cents and in a great many cases two a day for 4–8 weeks are enough to restore a malnourished child to health.
On the other hand, national governments are spending only 1% of their health budgets on specific high-impact nutrition programmes, despite the World Bank having calculated that an intervention on malnutrition would yield some of the highest returns across the range of aid to poor countries.
If we truly want to achieve the Zero Hunger goal by 2030 set by the SDGs (the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals), what is needed is global action on nutrition, and World Food Day represents an excellent opportunity to raise awareness among institutions and civil society to act and immediately accelerate investment in nutrition.
For this reason, today we will invite the public to change their Facebook profile picture to a dedicated cover and help spread the message that dying of hunger is #unacceptable. We cannot accept that in the third millennium there are still children dying of hunger. We must act. All of us.
