London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Athletes including Olympic double gold medallist Mo Farah joined politicians at a global hunger event with Prime Minister David Cameron and Brazilian Vice President Michel Temer aimed at stepping up global efforts to tackle child hunger by the time of the next Olympic Games in Rio in 2016.

To mark the summit, experts from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and the London International Development Centre released a statement calling for world leaders and businesses to take the opportunity to make a difference to lives ruined by not having enough food.

Ricardo Uauy, Professor of Public Health Nutrition at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said: “The importance of nutrition should not be forgotten and I am pleased that the issue is being discussed at this high level.  With the world gathered to celebrate sporting success in the Olympics, this is a great moment to commit to global action on reducing under-nutrition. But it will take many players to achieve this – governments, the private sector and countries themselves.

“Millennium Development Goal 1 is to end poverty and hunger by 2015. Yet three million children under five still die every year from causes related to under-nutrition. This is unacceptable in the modern day and is a moral outrage. 

“The more than 170 million children who survive yet remain stunted in their growth as a result of early malnutrition have an even greater impact, since their mental development is impaired and so is their capacity to learn from schooling. Improving nutrition in the first 1,000 days is a key factor in human social and economic development - as children’s growth improves so does educational performance and economic productivity, as demonstrated eloquently by Nobel Prize economist Robert Vogel. Investing in promoting healthy physical growth and brain development of children today will determine the world in which we will live in decades to come.

“There are four years until the next Olympic Games in Brazil so let’s hope there will be progress by then. As well as investment in agriculture and greater accountability, more research is needed. Through our work here at the School and in our partnerships we know some of the solutions but we are acutely aware of the need for far more research into the larger, underlying factors behind under-nutrition. We also need a better understanding of the potential role of the private sector in identifying solutions to under-nutrition.”

Professor Jeff Waage, Director of London International Development Centre (LIDC) and Chair of Leverhulme Centre for Integrative Research on Agriculture and Health (LCIRAH), said:  “The persistence of under-nutrition is a global tragedy. Food aid and food supplements can address emergency situations, but a sustainable solution must involve improving agriculture and food chains so as to make nutritious food accessible and affordable to all.

“Even in wealthy countries, food production and distribution is poorly linked to good health outcomes for many people. Eliminating under-nutrition will require that we break down the silos that isolate agriculture, nutrition and health research and policy. The innovation we seek is to make agriculture work for health.”

In August 2012 LIDC and LCIRAH produced a report for DFID ‘Current and planned research on agriculture for improved nutrition: a mapping and a gap analysis’. Placing nutrition at the centre, the conceptual framework proposed in the report identifies pathways by which research may contribute directly and indirectly to nutrition and how evidence of impact may be gathered along these.

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