Our children are growing up in an increasingly competitive world — one where the race to the top starts earlier than ever.
In Japan and most of the West, schoolchildren face standardized tests at an early age that can set the pace for the rest of their lives; in some cases, these litmus tests for the future start as young as five years old.
As parents, we’d do anything to help our children through this rigorous process. Some of us spend huge sums on private education. Others move house to qualify for the best schools. And it doesn’t stop there — tutoring, remedial classes, music lessons, study abroad, IQ testing — anything to give your child that extra edge.
In the developed world, we also worry about proper nutrition for our children and exercise to ward off the dangers of obesity. But while we’re happy to talk about healthy bodies making healthy minds, it’s been a long time since we had to worry about our children getting little or no food at all.
Unfortunately, for some 400 million children in the poorest countries, malnutrition is still the burning issue. This is not “merely” a question of a child going hungry, being underweight, unhealthy or physically stunted from malnutrition.
Researchers now have documented that young children who are malnourished tend to grow up with significantly lower IQs than those who are well fed — putting them behind the curve, in our competitive world, from the outset.
Recent research from Chile first established a direct link between brain volume and IQ (intelligence quotient): Put simply, the larger the brain, the higher the IQ. Given that 70 percent of our brain growth occurs in the first two years of our lives, the Chilean research showed that malnutrition in early childhood is likely to have a devastating effect on later mental performance.
Many other studies have shown that early malnutrition can have lasting effects on a child’s ability to learn. A British research project examining 5,000 people born in 1946 showed that those with low birth weights suffered damaging intellectual effects throughout childhood and into adolescence, influencing school performance and university entrance.
Add to that the fact that many millions of the poorest children, especially in countries like Niger, Chad or Bangladesh, will probably not go to school at all, as their households need every hand to make ends meet. Other poor children may attend school sporadically, or with their minds on when the next meal is coming rather than on what their teachers are telling them.
With their last chance to escape the poverty trap thus diminished, the potential of another generation is lost.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting the best for our own children; it would be unnatural to wish otherwise. But next time you upgrade your child’s laptop or book those extra tuition sessions, spare a thought for the millions of children whose fingers will never touch a keyboard — kids who will lucky to learn basic literacy and math.
Yesterday was World Food Day, an occasion to remember the 850 million chronically hungry people around the world and to remind ourselves that after decades of decline, that number has actually been growing by millions each year since the mid-1990s. Hunger still kills more people than AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined. In the 21st century, this is simply unacceptable.
We can make a difference. There is more than enough food in the world. For example in Italy, once the population’s nutritional requirements are met, there would be sufficient food left over for all the undernourished people in Ethiopia; in France the “extra” could feed the hungry of the Democratic Republic of Congo, while in the United States it could cover all the hungry in Africa.
Official Development Assistance has been rising steadily for several years and now tops $100 billion.
We can afford to help, but we need to develop a food first policy — poverty cannot be eliminated until hunger and malnutrition are laid to rest. And one way to start would be to prevent hunger from cheating children of hope.
So this year, let us work together to help end hunger for the children — through simple interventions such as mother and child health and nutrition programs, and school meals to boost enrolment and attendance. With all the challenges these kids face, let’s at a minimum enable them and their own children to get off to a running start.
— James Morris is executive director of the United Nations World Food Program (WFP).
