The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has just reported that 146 million children in the world never have enough to eat. Of more than eleven million deaths among children under five, half are caused by illnesses brought on by malnutrition. The rest simply starve to death.
These are appalling figures and should make every one of us fortunate enough to know our own families want for nothing in the way of nutrition feel deeply uncomfortable. We have become all too used to the harrowing pictures of starvation, often from Africa but the UNICEF report makes clear that half the malnourished children are in Asia — in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The problem is that while these children may eat daily, their food lacks the essential vitamins and minerals which help young bodies grow and develop. As a result, if they do survive to adulthood, they may be malformed or weak and thus always prey to infection which, in a person who has been properly nourished since babyhood, would be easily and quickly overcome.
Poor families in the developing world see their children as their future. In countries without welfare systems — or only rudimentary ones — it is the children and grandchildren who will care for their elders when those elders are no longer able to work and take care of themselves. It is thus understandable that couples seek to have as many children as they can, knowing that only some of them will survive to adulthood. For these parents, the greatest disaster imaginable would be to have all their children die and leave them with no one to support and care for them in their old age. This literally homegrown method of social insurance carries with it the seeds of its own failure. Large families make excessive demands on the pitifully limited resources of the very poor, and so ensure that all the children grow up on the brink of starvation and that many will die before the age of five.
First World governments have all endorsed the UN’s Millennium Development Goal of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger by 2015. This will mean halving the proportion of children who are underweight for their age. Yet as UNICEF now makes clear, with the exception of Latin America and the Caribbean, the goal is likely to be missed by a large margin.
Providing vitamins and minerals and good food for poor families is both an enormous undertaking and also a short-term palliative. What is actually needed are education and opportunity. Poverty does not just breed malnourished bodies in young children. It also breeds ignorant and malnourished minds which are being exploited by the fanatical advocates of terror. It was this very recognition which prompted the Organization of the Islamic Conference to declare its dedication to an ambitious program to attack poverty by promoting education in the Islamic world. This is a practical and hardheaded initiative. There is, however, an even better reason for tackling the horror highlighted by the UNICEF report — simply that no decent person should be prepared to let any child starve, let alone 140 million of them.
