The year 2013: Nutrition at the top of the global agenda

Abstract

Nutrition has come a long way! Looking at the turn of events, no doubt the year 2013 will indeed be remembered as the Year of Nutrition. Going down memory lane, in 1933 nutrition hit the headlines of a major journal, The Lancet, as kwashiorkor, which was described in a small African country called Gold Coast, present-day Ghana(1). At the time the disease was thought to be associated with food, and in following years the provision of food and food aid became a major thrust of development agencies and governments, in an attempt to address malnutrition. With time, the situation began to unfold as we understood the complexities of the problem. Today we see nutrition with many faces: undernutrition, overnutrition, hidden hunger, open hunger, etc. Critically, during the formative years, in particular the first 1000 days (spanning conception to 24 months after birth), undernutrition can result in deep-rooted, irreversible damage to health, development, productivity and quality of life. Undernutrition affects a child’s cognitive development and subsequently school performance. Undernutrition impairs human development and undermines national economic growth and development. Despite the harmful effects of undernutrition, it was marginalized. For decades, funding for nutrition was poor as it competed unsuccessfully with programmes on HIV/AIDS, malaria and other infectious disease. The fortunes of nutrition began to change with the advent of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG). It did not take long to realize that undernutrition was the most important constraint to achieving the MDG(2), and indeed the mid-term evaluation of the MDG clearly showed that countries and regions with a high burden of undernutrition were much less likely to meet the MDG timeline of 2015. In 2008, nutrition hit the headlines again. The Lancet Nutrition series of 2008 clearly presented the pathetic state of nutrition: fragmented and nobody’s business(3). The series of Lancet papers whipped global leaders into action. The Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement took up the challenge of coordinating efforts at the global level to support countries with high undernutrition burden to pay attention to this problem, and today thirty-five countries in this category have committed to address undernutrition. The last three years have seen some major shifts on the nutrition scene, especially at the global level. Many international organizations and governments have included nutrition strategies in their development plans.