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Forget climate change, we should spend on nutrition'
(Edgard Garrido/Reuters)
Malnutrition in mothers and their young children will claim 3.5 million lives this year
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Malnutrition should be the world's major priority for aid and development, apanel of eight leading economists, including five Nobel laureates, declaredyesterday.
An introduction to the Copenhagen Consensus
Economists battle it out to rank possible solutions for the great challenges in global stability and security
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The provision of supplements of vitamin A and zinc to children in developingcountries, to prevent avoidable deficiencies that affect hundreds ofmillions of children, is the most cost-effective way of making the world abetter place, the Copenhagen Consensus initiative has found.
Three other strategies for improving diets in poor nations were also namedamong the top six of 30 challenges assessed by the project, which aims toprioritise solutions to the world's many problems according to their costsand benefits.
Efforts to control global warming by cutting greenhouse gas emissions,however, were rated at the bottom of the league table, as the economistsconsidered the high costs of such action were not justified by the payoffs.Research into new low-carbon technologies, such as solar and nuclear fusionpower, was ranked as more worthwhile, in 14th place.
The previous Copenhagen Consensus, held in 2004, also listed global warming asits lowest priority. The exercise was organised by Bjorn Lomborg, thecontroversial Danish statistician who has long argued that though climatechange is real, current approaches to fighting it offer poor value formoney.
Dr Lomborg said: "This gives us the ultimate overview of how global decisionscan best be made and how we can best spend money to do good in the world.Prioritising is hard. It's much easier to say we want to do everything, butunfortunately we have limited resources. We don't just focus on what'sfashionable, but also on what's rational."
The jury of economists chose to emphasise malnutrition, and micronutrientsupplements in particular, because of the major effects that comparativelymoderate financial investments could have.
Around 140 million children suffer from vitamin A deficiency, which can causeblindness, immune system problems and death, or zinc deficiency, which canstunt growth. Supplements of these nutrients, however, are both effectiveand extremely cheap – at 20 US cents per person per year for vitamin A and$1 for zinc.
For just $60m a year, it would be possible to provide capsules of bothmicronutrients to 80 per cent of undernourished children in sub-SaharanAfrica and South Asia, with benefits worth more than $1bn. "Each dollar doesmore than $17 worth of good," Dr Lomborg said.
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1 comment:
That is, if you accept that there is a scarcity of resources. I do not subscribe to Malthus' belief, but instead I believe starvation is more an issue of accessibility and affordability. The book of Acts lays out a social blueprint where those who have share with those who are in need. Obesity rampant in one part of the globe while starvation is rampant in another part tells the story of a misallocation of resources. Then consider that land God meant to provide food for the inhabitants is used to grow items like sugar that is exported to nations in plenty from nations in need. This reveals that human action, more than population is a leading cause of hunger and starvation. Throw in dictators and military governments not responsible to the people, and you have tragedies like what is happening in North Korea today.
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