The United Nations says the number of severely malnourished children worldwide is rising because of the combined effects of the coronavirus pandemic, climate change and armed conflicts.
The UN children’s fund, Unicef, added that treating them was becoming more expensive because of the rising cost of therapeutic food.
The agency highlighted two regions – Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa – as being particularly at risk.
In Afghanistan over a million children are expected to suffer severe malnutrition – double the number in 2018.
In the Horn of Africa, where a severe drought has set in, that figure could reach two million.
Nearly half of all deaths in children under 5 are attributable to undernutrition; undernutrition puts children at greater risk of dying from common infections, increases the frequency and severity of such infections, and delays recovery.
In 2020*, 22 per cent, or more than one in five children under age 5 worldwide had stunted growth. That said, overall trends are positive. Between 2000 and 2020*, stunting prevalence globally declined from 33.1 per cent to 22 per cent, and the number of children affected fell from 203.6 million to 149.2 million. In 2020*, nearly two out of five children with stunting lived in South Asia while another two out of five lived in sub-Saharan Africa.