Addressing Hunger in the Post-2015 Consensus

The latest research series from The Post-2015 Consensus' asks how we can feed the over 800 million people who go to bed hungry every night.

The world faces many problems, and feeding a growing population adequately is certainly one of them. The good news is that we are well on track to halving the proportion of people suffering chronic hunger between 1990 and 2015. The bad news is that still leaves over 800 million people who go to bed hungry every night. Unfortunately, there are no easy ways to solve this problem quickly, but there are smart ways to use resources to do a lot of good both now and in the long term.

Both children and adults need a good quality diet but feeding young children well makes a big difference for their entire lives. The first 1,000 days of a child’s life – from conception to age two – are vital for proper development. Poorly nourished infants don’t grow as tall as their peers, and measuring the proportion of stunting (being smaller than the expected height for age) is a simple way of checking for malnourishment. These children don’t just fail to thrive physically; they also fall behind better-fed ones in developing cognitive skills. This lack of development has real long-term consequences. Stunted children do less well at school and lead poorer adult lives.

Most people would feel that feeding people properly – particularly young children – is something we simply have to tackle. And it turns out that what looks like a good idea morally is also really good economically. Good nutrition helps children develop properly and produces people who are able to make the best of all the opportunities which come their way.

Alleviating stunting can be done relatively cheaply – with a suite of interventions that produce dramatic long-term results and turns out to be one of the smartest post2015 targets for nutrition.

In total, if an individual works until 50 years old, each dollar spent returns $45. This only accounts for increased earning potential and excludes health benefits of better nutrition including 15% reduction in under-5 deaths, so it is likely a conservative estimate.

The payback changes across different countries. This is because the cost of nutrition interventions are about the same everywhere, but in countries with higher incomes or with higher economic growth rates, the benefit of smarter people are even greater. For Indonesia, each dollar would return $166 in future, higher earnings.

In our latest research focussed on the post-2015 development consensus we present an early release perspective paper on Food Security and Nutrition. Susan Horton, CIGI Chair in Global Health Economics at University of Waterloo, Canada and John Hoddinott, H.E. Babcock Professor of Food & Nutrition Economics and Policy at Cornell University conduct a cost-benefit analysis of nutrition interventions aimed at reducing stunting.

Please click here for the paper.