At the moment, malnutrition kills about 3.5 million mothers and children under five each year and this figure could rise, according to a Swiss foundation. According to Marc Van Ameringen, executive director of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, a foundation that aims to fight malnutrition by mobilising public-private partnerships, the malnutrition deaths will go up and more children will suffer stunted growth each year. The foundation are predicting an increase in deficiencies in iron, vitamin A and iodine.
At present only about $300m a year is allocated to tackle malnutrition, he said, and the need was for about $1bn-$1.5bn a year. There are 850 million people in the world starving and about two billion people with malnutrition.
The Global Alliance favours an earmarked fund to pay for more large programmes of food fortification and to put more money into existing ones.
The alliance's programmes currently reach about 200 million people, but the target is to improve nutrition for one billion people by 2010, Mr Van Ameringen said.
In particular, there needs to be a focus on special programmes that provide feeding for infants, he said, because that group is the most vulnerable.
What tends to happen in situations like this, he said, "is people consume less staple foods or they shift to foods with less nutritional value . . . So you are going to see much greater malnutrition."
Foremost, the alliance was concerned that the situation could undo many of its nutrition programmes, he said. In some places, such as Indonesia, where there has been mandatory food fortification, the position is being reversed, he noted.
"In other countries, where we're trying to get programmes in place, countries like Egypt, they're facing so many challenges [because of] the escalating food prices, its very difficult to add anything [which could increase] food pricing like fortification."
His organisation is worried about countries such as Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Zambia, and South Africa, in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where it has most of its programmes.
