2 days ago
This is easy to solve
Middle East peace, climate change, Ukraine — if Sisyphus were assigned one of today's global problems, he'd plead to be returned to rock rolling. So let's focus for a moment on a global challenge that we can actually solve: starvation.
I suspect that some Americans — perhaps including President Donald Trump — want to slash humanitarian aid because they think problems like starvation are intractable. Absolutely wrong! We have nifty, elegant and cheap solutions to global hunger.
Consider something really simple: deworming. I'm travelling through West Africa on my annual win-a-trip journey, in which I take a university student along on a reporting trip and every day we see children plagued by worms that aggravate their malnutrition. Nutrients go to their parasites, not to them.
While worms are worthy antagonists — a female worm can lay 200,000 eggs in a day — aid agencies can deworm a child for less than $1 a year. This makes them stronger, less anemic and more likely to attend school. Researchers have even found higher lifetime earnings.
In the US, we spend considerable sums deworming pets; every year I spend $170 deworming my dog, Connie Kuvasz Kristof. Yet deworming the world's children has never been as high a priority as deworming pets in the West, so we tolerate a situation in which 1 billion children worldwide carry worms.
My win-a-trip winner, Sofia Barnett of Brown University and I are reminded in every village we visit of the toll of hunger. Malnutrition leaves more than one-fifth of children worldwide stunted, countless millions cognitively impaired and vast numbers (especially menstruating women and girls) weak from anemia. Malnutrition is a factor in 45 per cent of child deaths worldwide.
A health worker weighs a baby at a clinic in Bombali District, Sierra Leone. NYT file photo
Yet we also see how these deaths can be inexpensively prevented.
In one Sierra Leone clinic, we met a 13-month-old boy, Abukamara, with sores and stick limbs from severe malnutrition. His mother, Mariatu Fornah, invited us to her village deep in the bush.
The family is impoverished and struggling. The parents and four children share a mattress in a thatch-roof mud-brick hut with no electricity, and no one in the family had eaten that day, even though it was early afternoon.
Fornah is doing what she can. She spent her entire savings of $3 and traded away a dress to get a traditional herb remedy for Abukamara, and she made the long trek to the clinic to get help. And there she found it — in the form of a miracle peanut paste. The clinic gave her a supply of the peanut paste, one foil packet a day and it will almost certainly restore Abukamara.
This peanut paste contains protein, micronutrients and everything a child's body needs, plus it tastes good and costs just $1 per child per day. Known by the brand name Plumpy'Nut or the ungainly abbreviation RUTF, for ready-to-use therapeutic food, it has saved millions of children's lives over the years.
Trump's closure of the United States Agency for International Development led to the cancellation of orders for RUTF and 185,535 boxes of it are piled up in the warehouse of Edesia Nutrition, according to the firm's founder and CEO, There are other inexpensive nutritional steps that could save many lives and some are astonishingly low-tech. Optimal breastfeeding could save up to 800,000 lives a year, The Lancet estimated, with no need for trucks, warehouses or refrigeration. Vitamin A supplementation would save lives, as would food fortification (adding nutrients to common foods). Promoting orange-flesh sweet potatoes over white-flesh ones would help, because orange ones have a precursor of vitamin A. Encouraging healthier crops like beans and millet rich with iron, rather than, say, cassava would help as well.
Investments in nutrition — along with others in vaccines and in treating diarrhea, pneumonia and other ailments — help explain why fewer than half as many children die before the age of 5 now as in 2000.
Yet after leading the world in fighting malnutrition, the US may be surrendering the field. America used to be the world's leading backer of nutrition, but the US government did not even send a formal delegation to the 2025 Nutrition for Growth summit, a conference held every four years. The US was expected to host the next summit, but now that's not clear.
In my journalistic career, I've seen children dying from bullets, malaria, cholera and simple diarrhea, but perhaps the hardest to watch are kids who are starving. Their bodies have sores that don't heal, their hair falls out and their skin peels. By that point, even nourishing food doesn't always bring them back.
What is most eerie is that such children don't cry or protest; they are impassive, with blank faces. That's because the body is fighting to keep the organs functioning and refuses to waste energy on tears or protests.
Their heads don't move, but their eyes follow us silently, presumably wondering if we will care enough to ease their pain.
Mr. Trump, will we? — The New York Times
