Host country Canada has decided to make maternal and child health a priority at this year’s G8 and G20 meetings, starting Friday June 25. Also on the list of priorities are food security and institutional reform in Africa. Here’s to hoping that Canada’s initiative leads to more effective global health policy among the world’s leading economies.
More information on the global health policies of Canada and other G8/G20 countries from the Kaiser Foundation.
Tag Archives: food security
“The world on a nutritional brink”–the problem of eroding food security
Today the school of public health welcomed Patrick Webb of Tufts University and the World Food Programme to discuss the food price crisis that sent a wave of (often deadly) riots across continents, from Mexico to Mauritania. Much of the talk centered around the fact that this was not a food crisis per se, but really a crisis of prices. The problem was not food production, but rather the fear that food stocks were inadequate, which led to market speculation and reactionary protectionist policies by many countries (restrictions on food exports, hoarding of imports).
What does all this have to do with health? In poor families that spend a majority of their income on food, there is very little buffer zone to respond to the kind of dramatic price increases (upwards of 100% in some places) that occurred in 2007-2008. They step from the brink into the abyss. There were a billion chronically undernourished people in the world in 2009, shamefully enough, the first time this statistic as been this high since the 1960s. After decades of decline in undernourishment, we are now seeing a rise over the past decade, and more troubling, an acceleration of that rise, with the 2008 crisis leading to 30,000 to 50,000 more infant deaths in Africa than if the crisis had not occurred. That’s a lot of dead babies, folks! Not to mention those who did not die, but suffer from the devastating consequences of wasting, stunting, and micronutrient deficiencies.
