G8 leaders must act to save most vulnerable in food crisis

NEWS | 03 July 2008

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) today called on G8 leaders who will gather next week in Japan to take bold decisions to adequately finance food aid and nutrition programs directed at young children. With the malnutrition crisis contributing to three to five million child deaths annually, the summit must commit to providing funds for new and effective strategies to address malnutrition.

At the G8 summit in Japan in 2000, world leaders showed that they could stimulate concrete change by creating the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Today there is significant support for a country that wants, for example, to scale up AIDS treatment. MSF now calls for the same level of commitment from the G8 in radically reducing malnutrition in children.

“There is an urgent need to act now to scale up treatment for children who are most at risk of dying of malnutrition,” said Dr. Susan Shepherd, nutritional advisor for MSF’s Access to Essential Medicines Campaign. “Ninety-five percent of children with the most severe form of malnutrition do not get adequate treatment. G8 leaders can take immediate steps to get children this life-saving treatment.”

The UN estimates that US$8 billion will be needed each year to fund comprehensive nutrition strategies for children and women in 100 million families at risk. One and a half billion dollars of this is needed annually to treat those children most at risk of death from the most severe form of malnutrition. G8 leaders need to ensure that affected countries can scale up programs and know that highly nutritious ready-to-use food will be available to them free of charge.

MSF is seeing rising levels of malnutrition in its projects in several of the world’s hotspots, including Ethiopia and Niger. The