Malnutrition in children at the start of life severely impairs their learning ability affecting their literacy and then affects their earning ability later in life, according to a study commissioned by a British charity. The report has for the first time highlighted the extent to which a child’s brain can be permanently damaged if they do not receive the right nutrition in the first 1,000 days of their life.
Chronically malnourished children are 20 per cent less literate than those with a healthier diet, and less able to read or write a simple sentence, and score lower on maths tests, according to research presented in Save the Children’s latest report Food for Thought.
The report also calculated that children who are malnourished go on to earn 20 per cent less as adults than the children who are well nourished. However, it also quotes another study that estimates this earning deficit for malnourished children at 66 per cent.
By extrapolating a 20 per cent reduction in earnings to a global level, the report, which studied childhood poverty India, Ethiopia, Peru and Vietnam, shows that today’s malnutrition could cost the global economy as much as $125 billion when today’s children reach working age in 2030.
In India, it has been estimated that the economic cost of micronutrient malnutrition amounts to between 0.8 per cent and 2.5 per cent of GDP, equivalent to $15–46 billion. In 2012, the UN figures suggested that 47 per cent children under five in southern Asia stunted, that is they were too short for their age due to poor nutrition. In India, 61.4 million children under five are stunted. To highlight the crisis, over 25 of world’s best-loved children’s authors and illustrators on Tuesday called on G8 leaders to step up their efforts to tackle hunger around the world.
“In Andhra Pradesh in India, if nutritional inequalities were tackled in such a way that low-caste children gained the same average nutritional status as their upper caste counterparts, this would close existing caste cognitive differentials by 25 per cent,” the study revealed.