More than one in four children under the age of five lives in a situation of “severe food poverty”, warned the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef).
This means that more than 180 million children are at risk of suffering serious health consequences if they do not have a nutritious and diverse diet, according to a Unicef report released on Wednesday night .
A “shocking number” of children “survive on a very poor diet, consuming products from two or fewer food groups,” Harriet Torlesse, one of the report’s authors, told France-Presse news agency.
According to Unicef recommendations, young children should consume foods from at least five of the eight food groups daily (breast milk, cereals, fruits and vegetables rich in vitamin A, meat or fish, eggs, dairy products, legumes , other fruits and vegetables).
However, 440 million children under the age of 5 (or 66%), living in around a hundred low- and middle-income countries analyzed, do not have access to these five groups every day , thus living in a situation of “food poverty”.
And of these, around 181 million (27%) consume, at most, foods from two groups.
These “children who eat just two food groups a day, for example rice and a little milk, are 50% more likely to suffer from severe forms of malnutrition”, such as wasting and wasting extreme, which can lead to death, warned Unicef director Catherine Russell in a statement.
These children survive and grow, but “they do not thrive. They are less successful in school and, as adults, have more difficulty earning a living, which maintains a cycle of poverty from generation to generation §tion”Torlesse explained.
“The brain, heart and immune system, which are important for development and protection against diseases, depend on vitamins, minerals and proteins”, he insisted the nutrition specialist.
This serious food poverty is concentrated in 20 countries, with particularly worrying situations in Somalia (63% of children under five affected), the Republic of Guinea (54%), Guinea Bissau (53%) and Afghanistan (49%).
And, although there is no data available for rich countries, children from poor households also face these nutritional deficiencies.
The report pays special attention to the situation in the Gaza Strip, where the Israeli offensive provoked by the unprecedented attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas on October 7, led to the “collapse of food and health systems” .
At a global level, noting only “slow progress” in the last 10 years in the fight against food poverty, the report defended the introduction of social protection and humanitarian aid mechanisms for the most vulnerable see.
But it is also a transformation of the agri-food system, blaming beverages with a high sugar content and ultra-processed industrial dishes “aggressively marketed to families and which have become the norm for food of children”.
These products are often “cheap, but also very high in calories, very salty and fatty. They suppress hunger, but do not provide the vitamins and minerals that children need”, highlighted Harriet Torlesse.
