UNICEF report | A quarter of children under 5 live in “severe food poverty”

(United Nations) More than one in four children under the age of 5 in the world live in “severe food poverty”, or more than 180 million children who risk serious consequences due to lack of a nutritious and diversified diet, alerts UNICEF.

A “shocking” number of children “survive on a very poor diet, consuming products from two or fewer food groups,” Harriet Torlesse, one of the authors of the report published Wednesday evening, told AFP.

According to the recommendations of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), young children should consume foods from at least five of eight groups every day (breast milk, cereals, fruits and vegetables rich in vitamin A, meat or fish, eggs, dairy products, legumes, other fruits and vegetables).

But 440 million children under the age of 5 (or 66%) living in around a hundred low- and middle-income countries reviewed do not have access to these five groups every day, and therefore live in a situation of “poverty”. eating “.

And among them, some 181 million (or 27%) consume foods from two groups at best.

These “children who consume only two food groups per day, for example rice and a little milk, are 50% more likely to suffer serious forms of malnutrition”, warns the boss of UNICEF, Catherine Russell, in a communicated.

Serious forms such as emaciation, extreme weight loss which can lead to death.

And if these children survive and grow up, “they don’t thrive. They do less well at school, and as adults, they have more difficulty earning a living, this maintains a cycle of poverty from generation to generation,” explains Harriet Torlesse.

“The brain, the heart, the immune system, important for development, for protection against diseases, depend on vitamins, minerals, proteins,” insists this nutrition expert.

Too sweet, salty, fatty

This severe food poverty is concentrated in 20 countries, with particularly worrying situations in Somalia (63% of children under 5 years old affected), Guinea (54%), Guinea-Bissau (53%) or Afghanistan (49%). %).

And if data does not exist for rich countries, children from poor homes are certainly not spared from these nutritional deficiencies either.

The report places particular emphasis on the situation in Gaza where the Israeli offensive provoked by the unprecedented Hamas attack on October 7 has led “the food and health systems to collapse”.

Based on five series of data collections carried out by text message between December and April from families benefiting from a financial aid program in the Gaza Strip, UNICEF estimates that 9 out of 10 children there live in severe food poverty. . Data not necessarily representative which, however, illustrates the catastrophic deterioration of the situation since 2020, where only 13% of children lived in this situation, according to the UN agency.

At the global level, noting only “slow progress” over ten years in the fight against food poverty, the report calls for the establishment of social protection and humanitarian aid mechanisms for the most vulnerable.

He also calls for a transformation of the agri-food system, calling into question very sugary drinks and ultra-processed industrial meals, “marketed aggressively to families and which are becoming the norm for feeding children”.

These products are often “cheap, but also very high in calories, very salty, fatty. They suppress hunger, but do not provide the vitamins and minerals that children need,” underlines Harriet Torlesse.

And children acquire a taste for it very early, potentially for their entire life, promoting obesity.