A grim new study by thirty international organizations is asserting that before any global recovery from the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, roughly 168,000 children will have died due to hunger and malnutrition. 

In concluding the findings, the eye-opening research from Standing Together for Nutrition Consortium, which includes the World Bank, World Food Program, UNICEF, and USAID, tapped into targeted phone surveys and expansive economic and nutrition data gathered this year. 

Saskia Osendarp, who led the research, told the Associated Press that she estimates that an additional 11.9 million children, mostly in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, will suffer from some form of stunting and wasting—considered by medical experts to be the most severe forms of malnutrition. 

Women who are currently pregnant “will deliver children who are already malnourished at birth, and these children are disadvantaged from the very start,” added Osendarp, who is the executive director of the Micronutrient Forum. 

“An entire generation is at stake.” 

The years-long battle against hunger and malnutrition had been considered a global success until the pandemic struck.   

For about twenty consecutive years, the number of stunted children worldwide declined each year—from 199.5 million in 2000 to 144 million in 2019. Those suffering from wasting stood at fifty-four million in 2010, which had trended lower to forty-seven million last year.  

Now, with the pandemic wreaking havoc across the world for more than ten months, those figures will likely head back to levels seen in 2010, according to the researchers.  

In an effort to reverse the troubling trend, UNICEF has already pledged to spend $700 million on nutrition programs annually over the next five years—which is $224 million more than it had committed to over the past five years.

Another new study from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) earlier this month said that due to the severe long-term impact of the pandemic, an additional 207 million people worldwide could be pushed into extreme poverty by 2030—raising the total number to more than a billion.

The agency, however, did acknowledge that such a dire forecast can still be prevented. One way is a tighter focus on achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), which are the blueprint to address a variety of global challenges from inequality and climate change to environmental degradation. Such a concerted global effort has the potential to slow the rise of extreme poverty, especially among girls and women, by lifting 146 million people from its grip.

UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner asserted that the ongoing pandemic is a “tipping point” and the future of millions of people would depend on making keen decisions today.

“As this new poverty research highlights, the COVID-19 pandemic is a tipping point, and the choices leaders take now could take the world in very different directions,” he said in a news release.

“We have an opportunity to invest in a decade of action that not only helps people recover from COVID-19, but that resets the development path of people and planet towards a fairer, resilient, and green future.”  

Ethen Kim Lieser is a Minneapolis-based Science and Tech Editor who has held posts at Google, The Korea Herald, Lincoln Journal Star, AsianWeek, and Arirang TV. Follow or contact him on LinkedIn.  

Image: Reuters