Why food is not enough

Why Food is Not Enough

Persistent high rates of child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia will not be reduced if malnutrition is not addressed more aggressively. This is a medical emergency.

MSF teams see the devastating impact of childhood malnutrition every day, having treated more than 150,000 children in 99 programmes in 2006. Malnutrition weakens resistance and increases the risk of dying from pneumonia, diarrhoea, malaria, measles and AIDS, five diseases that are responsible for half of all deaths in children under five.  
Despite its overwhelming contribution to child mortality and its impact on long-term health, treatment of malnutrition has not been a high enough priority in international and national public health planning and programming.

Current policies to address malnutrition have serious flaws. Many programmes designed to reduce mortality of young children from malnutrition focus on changing behaviours of mothers, education about proper food choices and addressing poverty or food security.  

Such strategies are insufficient because mothers in the Sahel, the Horn of Africa or Asia don’t just need advice about how to feed their children. They need access to foods that contain the 40 essential nutrients a young child, particularly under the age of three needs to grow and be healthy. Exclusive breastfeeding which is widely promoted is only enough to meet the nutritional needs until six months of age.

Addressing the long-term challenges of poverty and food security is equally important but is not enough to address the needs of malnourished children that are at greatest risk of dying today.

A new concept of delivering essential nutrients through simple, highly nutritious ready-to-use food (RUF), specifically designed for young children, has greatly expanded the potential for effective nutritional interventions.

The vast majority of seriously malnourished children can now receive treatment at home, under the supervision of their mother or other caregiver, instead of in hospital.

Despite accumulated evidence of therapeutic RUF’s effectiveness - high cure rates, low mortality and low default rates - donors and UN agencies continue to ship hundreds of thousands of tons of enriched blended flours to be distributed as supplementary foods, even when the effectiveness of this strategy has proven to be limited for children under the age of three.   

"Eating millet porridge every day is the equivalent of living off bread and water.  With luck, toddlers here might have milk once or twice a week.  Young children are so susceptible to malnutrition because what they eat lacks essential vitamins and minerals to help them grow, remain strong and fight off infections."
Dr. Susan Shepherd, MSF Medical Coordinator for the nutritional programme in Maradi, Niger, 2007.

Food is Not Enough, MSF’s malnutrition campaign is advocating for global scale-up of therapeutic ready-to-use food (RUF) for the most at risk children. The campaign is pushing to ensure that more children under three in malnutrition hotspots receive essential nutrients to avoid becoming seriously malnourished. MSF is also highlighting the need for increased research and development into a range of nutritional products adapted to these children’s needs.