Alexander targets 12 million undernourished children

26 January 2010

Twelve million undernourished children could be helped to receive better nutrition over the next five years thanks to support UK-funded programmes, International Development Secretary Douglas Alexander will say tonight.  

This will be a key outcome of the forthcoming nutrition strategy from the Department for International Development (DFID) which will focus especially on malnutrition in Ethiopia, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, India and Nepal,

Mr Alexander will be speaking to a World Food Programme (WFP) conference in Rome, where he will outline steps to tackle the global hunger crisis, which he will say threatens the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

He will also announce £200m continued funding for the ‘productive safety net’ programme in Ethiopia which has protected 8m Ethiopians from ‘food shocks’.  This programme has provided cash or food for work for millions of Ethiopians without a reliable supply of food, who would otherwise have sold vital possessions in order to survive, trapping them further into poverty.

Douglas Alexander will announce £5m for the WFP in Nepal, which will help feed 450,000 people for three months.

Douglas Alexander will outline a three-pronged approach to tackling hunger:

• Productivity: using science and technology to grow more food for an expanding population.  This is backed up by DFID’s £400m Research Strategy and will be the subject of a forthcoming Foresight report which will explore the best ways to improve food production
• Access: ensuring the poorest have access to that food, via programmes such as the Ethiopian safety net scheme
• Nutrition: ensuring the most vulnerable – such as children and pregnant women – get better quality food.  DFID’s first nutrition strategy will be published shortly.

Douglas Alexander is expected to say:

“With one in six people on the planet going hungry each day, it’s clear that we need radically to increase our efforts towards tackling the hunger problem. Let’s be honest, ‘business as usual’ wasn’t going to get us to the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) in the good times – and it certainly won’t get us there now.”

He will also praise the public’s response to the earthquake in Haiti, saying:

“I believe we have both the moral duty and the mandate to act. The extent of the worldwide response to the earthquake in Haiti has shown that common humanity is not merely an enlightenment dream, nor simply an empty slogan of globalisation.”

He will add:

“Today’s hunger crisis happens far away from the cameras. Its victims are dispersed in towns and villages around the world. Tens of millions of mothers, struggling to feed their children – yesterday, today and tomorrow. But their need for food reflects the very basics of human life.

“The question facing all of us here today is not: can we end this hunger crisis? But rather, will we apply our science, our skills and our political will to be the generation that finally banishes hunger?”

Current estimates are that more than one billion people – one in six of the world’s population – go hungry every day.  A child dies every ten seconds from malnutrition and a third of all children under five are stunted from undernutrition.