Feast and famine

MAHARASHTRA, 2010. In a village 130km (80 miles) from Mumbai, the head of a nursery is weighing a child. Four years old, she is just 10kg (22lb), two-thirds of what she should be. More than half the nursery's charges are below their proper weight ('wasted' in the jargon) or short for their age ('stunted', a result of years of undernourishment). The children out in the fields are even worse off, the teacher says. And most of their mothers are anaemic. Yet this Indian state is not especially poor.India has done a miserable job of improving its people's nutrition'but so has most of the world. In 1974, Henry Kissinger, America's secretary of state, told the first world food summit that no child would go to bed hungry within ten years. He was miles off. Figures calculated for a follow-up conference, held on November 19th in Rome, show that 162m children under five are stunted. The rate of child wasting has not budged in the past couple of years. The number of undernourished people in the world has fallen since 1990, but only by a fifth, and now stands at about 800m. That is despite real global GDP growth of 3.6% a year over the same period and...Continue reading
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