Fighting malnutrition

sir – Today is World Food Day. We, a group of 64 nutrition researchers and practitioners, are deeply concerned that Covid-19 is driving an underreported surge in global hunger and malnutrition that poses a greater threat to children in the poorest countries than the virus itself.

The British Government has helped to lead global action on malnutrition, but UK aid commitments expire this year. Amid escalating needs, time is running out to ensure that support is in place to maintain life-saving nutrition interventions.

Even before the pandemic struck, more than 2,000 children were dying each day from wasting (meaning they were too thin for their height). This number is set to rise steeply: recent modelling has found that 433 more children could die each day from wasting this year than was anticipated before the pandemic.

Child stunting (where children are too short for their age), previously affecting 150 million children, is also set to rise. This is associated with physical and cognitive damage, as well as long-term harm to individual, societal and thus global health and well-being.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office has been created at a time when Covid-19 threatens to reverse hard-won progress on nutrition that UK aid has helped to achieve.

For the sake of the lives and life chances of the next generation, we are urging the Government to maintain its leadership in this moral, humanitarian and development priority by recommitting itself to investing in nutrition.

Professor Corinna Hawkes Director, Centre for Food Policy City, University of London

Professor James A Berkley Professor of Paediatric Infectious Diseases, University of Oxford

Dr Lawrence Haddad

Executive Director, Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition

Professor William A Masters Friedman School of Nutrition and Department of Economics, Tufts University and 60 others; see telegraph.co.uk