One in three members of the global population is malnourished. This is a huge problem, as nutrition is at the core of well-being. Good nutrition is a prerequisite for optimal health and education and is a key contributor to economic development. This problem exists in every country on the planet — yet the strategies or high-impact interventions available to resolve it are not being implemented due to lack of money, skills or political will.
The new Sustainable Development Goals, signed in New York this year, will be much harder, if not impossible, to attain in the face of malnutrition. Malnutrition threatens to erode the new goals laid down in the recent Group of 20 summit in Turkey and the upcoming COP21 climate summit in Paris.
But countries that are determined to reduce malnutrition can achieve their ambitions, according to the recently launched 2015 Global Nutrition Report. Investing in improved nutrition can have economic returns that outpace the U.S. stock market in recent decades. Investing $1 in high impact nutrition actions, such as exclusive breast-feeding, can yield up to $16 in economic benefits — a rate of return on investment that outperforms most stock markets.
About the authors
Lawrence Haddad
Lawrence Haddad is a World Food Prize winner and has been GAIN’s executive director since 2016. Haddad chaired Action Track 1 Ending Hunger and Malnutrition at the 2021 U.N. Food Systems Summit. In 2022, he was awarded a CMG for “services to international agriculture and nutrition” by King Charles III of the United Kingdom. Before GAIN, Haddad co-founded the Global Nutrition Report, was director of the Institute of Development Studies, and was director of the International Food Policy Research Institute’s Division of Food Consumption and Nutrition. An economist, Haddad completed his Ph.D. in Food Research at Stanford University in 1988.
Zulfiqar Bhutta
Dr. Zulfiqar A. Bhutta is the Robert Harding Inaugural Chair in Global Child Health at The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, and the founding director of the Center of Excellence in Women and Child Health, at the Aga Khan University, a unique joint appointment. He was a founding board member of the Global Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health and co-chairs the Maternal and Child Committee of WHO eastern Mediterranean region. He is the president-elect of the International Paediatric Association assuming leadership in 2016 and a leading voice for integrated maternal, newborn and child health globally.
