Standing at the lectern, Tanzanian Frank Kapeta looked even younger than his 17 years. The explanation, he said, was simple: “If you don’t eat, you don’t grow.”
He said when he was growing up he often had just one meal a day. “Between the ages of two and four, my family frequently faced hunger and malnutrition. Some days I felt so ill that I couldn’t even get out of bed,” he recalled.
Kapeta and fellow Tanzanian campaigner Mwajuma Tulsidas have become the figureheads for a campaign to ensure children have enough to eat – and enough of the right types of food.
First 1,000 days
In 2011 a quarter of all five-year-olds in developing countries were stunted because they did not get the right nutrients in their first 1,000 days – and they were already lagging behind because their mothers were not properly nourished during pregnancy.
Half of all preventable child deaths are down to poor nutrition. Just 40 cent in every €100 contributed to aid budgets by the developed world every year is spent trying to improve the quality of the food eaten, not just the amount.
On Saturday, Taoiseach Enda Kenny joined British prime minister David Cameron in London for a global conference where £2.7 billion (€3.2 billion) was pledged by governments, non-governmental agencies and private business to tackle nutrition over the next eight years.
The money will encourage the planting of nutritious, resilient crops, promote breastfeeding, encourage companies to put nutrition at the heart of their operations, and help governments in developing countries target their resources.
“There are still one billion people going hungry. One in four children are stunted through chronic malnutrition. And 165 million children are so malnourished by the age of two that their minds and bodies will never fully develop,” Cameron said.
The campaign is unpopular with some, particularly War on Want, because it brings together governments, NGOs, multinationals such as Unilever and the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, which is funded by the profits of a hedge fund that has donated more than €1 billion over the past five years.
However, the four-way alliance is crucial, in the eyes of Cameron.
Business, scientists, government and investors must co-operate, he said, building on the example of Robert Mwanga, who bred an orange-fleshed sweet potato that is set to meet the vitamin A needs of 15 million people in Africa by 2020.
Ireland's famine
The Taoiseach offered public support to Cameron on an issue that has caused him grief with a majority of his own backbenchers.
In his speech, Kenny spoke of Ireland’s famine: “I say this as leader of a country where famine and hunger run deep in our psyche. In the 1840s we ate grass to fill our stomachs. With our children we lay down to die in graveyards to be assured a Christian burial.”
Ireland will spend €135 million – not new money, but "reprioritised" aid spending – over the next eight years on nutrition in developing countries.
Privately, the Irish side claims a significant influence over the EU’s decision to pledge to spend €3.5 billion over coming years to tackle the scourge of hunger.
Ireland’s decisions, said Kenny, had come from listening to and learning from “the experiences of those men and women” living with failed crops, inundation, erosion, rising food prices, hunger and under-nutrition.
“They are our brothers, our sisters. Those men and women need to know that we are with them and are doing all we can to make sure they have the food to feed and nourish their families, to secure their lives, their communities, their futures,” he said.
