UNICEF: Responding to crisis in Myanmar

NEW YORK, USA, 5 May 2008 -- UNICEF has sent five missions to assess the immediate needs of children and families in Myanmar in the wake of the devastating cyclone that struck the country on Saturday. With estimates of the death toll rapidly rising, UNICEF will lead the relief effort in providing basic needs, including water and sanitation, as well as ensuring that children are protected and their education is interrupted as little as possible.

Read the full report.    Read more...

Rising food prices: international drivers and implications

The Center on International Cooperation (CIC) at New York University has published its brief on rising global food prices, prepared for presentation to UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Strategy Unit. Summary of key themes are:

• Food prices are going up. Average food prices went up by 3% in G7 economies between July 2006 and July 2007, and by 10.5% in developing countries; over the same period, corn up 60% and wheat around 50% on US market.
• Demand growth is accelerating. Historically demand growth averaged around 1.5 %/yr; now 2.0%, and Goldman Sachs estimate 2.6% within a decade. World Bank estimates food production will have to rise nearly 50%, and meat by 85%, from 2000 to 2030. World food consumption has been greater than supply for past five years, say International Food Policy Research Institute.
• The relationship between energy and agriculture is changing. Since food can be used for fuel, the potential for an arbitrage relationship opens up, implying greater linkage between prices for both.
• From yield expansion to acreage expansion. Historic demand growth has been met through increasing crop output per unit of land, but commodities analysts say amount of land cultivated will need to expand to meet rising demand. Strong potential for competition between land uses: food, feed, fibre, fuel (and increasingly, carbon sequestration?)
• Rising food prices are one of a suite of ‘scarcity issues’. Strong interlinkages and overlaps between climate change, energy security, water depletion, fisheries depletion, deforestation and other issues – never more so than in the case of agriculture and food (see appended table).
• An increasingly central issue for development and state fragility. While recent development discourse has concentrated on aid, trade and debt relief (and latterly governance too), scarcity issues – and above all climate, energy and food – and how to build resilience to them, are likely to emerge as increasingly central.
• Serious lack of multilateral capacity. Recent UN reform efforts have highlighted problems of fragmentation, ‘silo’ organisations and poor coordination. Multilateral management of the global food system may be the most extreme example – but barely addressed by the recent UN High Level Panel on System Coherence.

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Political fallout forces biofuel rethink

The New York Times' covers the political and policy rethink on biofuels following recent high-level calls to act on rising global food prices:

The idea of turning farms into fuel plants seemed, for a time, like one of the answers to high global oil prices and supply worries. That strategy seemed to reach a high point last year when Congress mandated a fivefold increase in the use of biofuels.

But now a reaction is building against policies in the United States and Europe to promote ethanol and similar fuels, with political leaders from poor countries contending that these fuels are driving up food prices and starving poor people. Biofuels are fast becoming a new flash point in global diplomacy, putting pressure on Western politicians to reconsider their policies, even as they argue that biofuels are only one factor in the seemingly inexorable rise in food prices.

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Riots ring alarm bells on global food crisis...

Recent days have seen food riots and a string of announcements by major agencies in an effort to awaken the global community to the crisis in food prices and supplies. Thirty-three countries are reporting riots due to the heavy increases in food prices:



CNN reports on a "Food Crisis Spawns Deadly Riots". Global food inflation is reaching emergency proportions and could wipe out seven years of gains in fighting poverty.



High food prices are threatening recent gains in overcoming poverty and malnutrition, and are likely to persist over the medium term, says the World Bank:



Al Jazeera reports on the impact in Bangladesh:



WB's Zoellick is calling for a "New Deal" on global food policy, echoing the economic response to the Great Depression, underlining the urgent need for action:



And for the World Food Programme, its recent warnings of a perfect storm in global food insecurity are coming true:

MORE RESOURCES:

• Brown puts food, child hunger on G8 agenda
  
• Food price rises threaten global security
• Price of rice continues record surge
• US government ready to export rice to Philippines
• Poor Thai farmers guard their fields as rice prices soar
• Rising Food Prices Intensify Food Insecurity
• Development Gateway: Food Security

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WB: early childhood and malnutrition

"Children everywhere in the world have the same growth potential in the first five years of life. There is no reason why children in Peru need to be the exception!"The story of two very similar communities in Perú (Aprimac region), both living from local harvest and sharing a long history of poverty. The video focuses on how malnourishment from the very early years can seriously affect their physical and intellectual growing. From the World Bank.    Read more...

Congress bucks Bush food-aid plans

Reuters reports on the progress of the US Congress Farm Bill, the US$286 billion package that will set farm subsidies, food stamps, and food-aid policy for the next five years:

... Aid workers likewise expect Congress to defy administration advice and carve out around $450 million a year from the main food aid budget for longer-term, nonemergency projects. That set-aside for nonemergency aid would be in line with what the House passed in July, and would eat almost 40 percent of the overall emergency food aid budget.
Unlike emergency aid, the nonemergency programs channel commodity donations to aid groups, which sell the crops within poor countries to fund projects supporting more productive farms, improved nutrition, or better local sanitation.
According to Bob Zachritz, senior policy adviser at World Vision, an aid group that runs nonemergency food aid programs in more than 30 countries, the approach is based on the adage, "Do you give a person a fish or do you teach them to fish?"
He said the nonemergency programs, which have received about $350 million a year in recent years, can be more costly in the short run, but are ultimately more efficient because they can break the cycle of famine and food crises.

Read the entire article here and also see our previous coverage:

• US Senate plans $600m p.a. in long-term food aid

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Sanitation: the 'forgotten' MDG target...

"The cause of many of our diseases is the condition of our lavatories and our bad habit of disposing of excreta anywhere and everywhere".

Mahatma Gandhi, 1925

Ghandi had no hesitation saying that in his view sanitation was more important than independence. In this, the International Year of Sanitation, it is alarming to note that some 1.5 million children die every year due to inadequate water, sanitation and hygiene, while more than a third of the world's population does not have access to basic toilet facilities.
In an interview with Inter Press, Andrew Hudson of UNDP marks out the enormous impact poor sanitation is having on children in developing countries:

Some 1.8 million children die each year as a result of diarrhoea -- which is 4,900 deaths a day. This is equivalent to the under-five population in London and New York combined. Access to sanitation is one of the strongest determinants of child survival: the transition from unimproved to improved sanitation reduces child mortality by a third. Astoundingly, an estimated 443 million school days are lost each year from water-related illness.

Read more.    Read more...

Record Financing For Biofuels, Not Food

The Inter Press news agency reports:

"Biofuels have quickly turned from environmental saviour to just another mega-scale get-rich quick scheme. Countries and regions without their own oil reserves to tap now see their farms, peatlands and forests as potential "oil fields" -- shallow but renewable lakes of green oil.
"However, renewable does not mean sustainable, and in most cases the only green part of biofuel is the wealth they generate.
"Not surprisingly, given the record high oil prices, worldwide investment in bioenergy reached 21 billion dollars in 2007, according to the U.N. Environment Programme. The Inter-American Development Bank announced 3 billion dollars for investment in private sector biofuel projects -- mainly in Brazil -- while the World Bank said it had 10 billion dollars available in 2007.
"Meanwhile development assistance for food-producing agriculture had fallen to 3.4 billion dollars in 2004 -- with the World Bank's share less than 1 billion dollars, according to the Bank's own World Development Report on Agriculture released in October 2007. And most of this financial assistance was spent on subsidising use of chemical fertilisers."

Read the entire article here.    Read more...

Hunger: 'gravest single threat to world's public health'

Following up on the findings of the recent Lancet series maternal and child malnutrition, The Economist reports "hunger has an even bigger impact on children's health than was thought", and:

...if the research is right, money for improving nutrition would be the most effective sort of aid around. At the moment, roughly $300m of aid goes to basic nutrition each year, less than $2 for each child below two in the 20 worst affected countries. In contrast, HIV/AIDS, which causes fewer deaths than child malnutrition, received $2.2 billion—$67 per person with HIV in all countries (including rich ones). Focusing on nutrition and mortality also makes sense... because it forces policymakers to pay attention to health-care systems as a whole, rather than trying to save children “one disease at a time”. Given the scale of the crisis, the case for aid organisations redirecting money and attention to the problem of hunger looks compelling.

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WEF '08: Call to action on MDGs

Covering the Davos session calling for urgent action on the Millennium Development Goals, the Associated Press reports:

Nearly 1 billion people live on less than $1 a day, half of the developing world lacks basic sanitation, 1 million people die of malaria each year, AIDS still wreaks havoc on poor nations and 72 million children are not in school, according to a panel that included Gates, U2 frontman Bono, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Among the speakers, Bono offered this:

"This is the moment when our generation gets to draw a line in the sand — or snow," (referring to Davos' Alpine setting). "Where other generations put a man on the moon, we can't put every kid in school. ... Where other generations fought fascism and injustice and prevailed, we fail in our fight against the (malaria-carrying) anopheles mosquito, which kills 3,000 children a day."

Find more articles on the session here.    Read more...

WEF '08: new push to combat malaria

Leaders including World Bank Group president Robert B. Zoellick, UNICEF executive director Ann Veneman convened in Davos to announce an expanded 36-month effort to achieve scale-up of malaria control across sub-Saharan Africa. Timed with the release of new report at the World Economic Forum claiming 3.5 million lives could be saved over the next five years if malaria prevention and treatment measures were rapidly scaled up in the 30 hardest hit countries in Africa, the accelerated effort will help malaria-endemic countries by combining the best practices of public health with the best ideas from the private sector.

The report, We Can't Afford to Wait: The Business Case for Rapid Scale-up of Malaria Control in Africa, was prepared by Malaria No More and McKinsey & Company on behalf of the Roll Back Malaria Partnership (RBM). It details how rapid scale-up would also increase annual economic output by as much as $30 billion in Africa, prevent 672 million malaria cases, and free up 427,000 needed hospital beds over five years.    Read more...

WEF '08: Gates calls for "creative capitalism"

At Davos to announce USD300 million in grants to develop farming in the least developed countries, Bill Gates addressed the World Economic Forum to call on the world's business elite to usher in a new form of "creative capitalism" to meet the challenges facing humanity:

"If we are serious about ending extreme hunger and poverty around the world, we must be serious about transforming agriculture for small farmers, most of whom are women. The challenge here is to design a system including profit and recognition to do more for the poor."

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Zoellick: fighting hunger a global priority

On the eve of Davos '08, World Bank President, Robert Zoellick has used an interview with the Financial Times to call for more action on fighting hunger and malnutrition:

The Bank president said he would try to use the Davos gathering to "draw attention to hunger and malnutrition, the forgotten Millennium Development Goals".
Fighting malnutrition was essential to success on other development fronts, such as reducing infant mortality, improving maternal health and strengthening primary education, he argued.
Mr Zoellick said he expected food prices - and energy prices - to stay high for a sustained period. He said: "I think biofuels is an element in the overall demand picture."
But he did not single out booming demand for non-fossil fuels as the cause of high food prices, as some development experts have done. He said a big contributor to rising grain prices worldwide was increasing incomes and changing diets in China, India and other large developing countries.

   Read more...

UNICEF: integrated approach key to child survival

Strategies to help reduce the number of deaths of under-fives feature in the latest stanza of UNICEF’s annual flagship report - The State of the World’s Children 2008: Child Survival.

“Community-level integration of essential services for mothers, newborns and young children, and sustainable improvements in national health systems can save the lives of many of the more than 26,000 children under five who die each day,” said UNICEF Executive Director, Ann Veneman, at the reort's launch in Geneva. “The report describes the impact of simple, affordable life-saving measures, such as exclusive breastfeeding, immunization, insecticide-treated bed nets and vitamin A supplementation, all of which have helped to reduce child deaths in recent years.”

The challenge is to ensure children have access to a continuum of health care, backed by strong national health systems, said WHO Director-General, Dr. Margaret Chan, at the launch. “Innovative programs in many countries show that an integrated approach where each child is reached with a package of interventions at one time can bring immediate benefits."    Read more...

Landmark series on child undernutrition launched

Undernutrition is the largely preventable cause of over a third - 3.5 million - of all child deaths and 11% of the total disease burden worldwide are due to maternal and child undernutrition.
There is a golden interval for intervention: from pregnancy to 2 years of age. After age 2 years, undernutrition will have caused irreversible damage for future development towards adulthood.
Yet the international nutrition system is broken. Leadership is absent, resources are too few, capacity is fragile, and emergency response systems are urgently needed.

****

These and other stark findings are the conclusions of an international collaboration of investigators publishing their findings in The Lancet's maternal and child undernutrition series.
The series aims to increase awareness around maternal and child undernutrition and serve as a catalyst for national-level governments, NGOs and the international nutrition community to spur action and stimulate national interest, leadership, and commitment.

The five papers offer new evidence and findings across the following issues:

• Paper 1: Over a third of child deaths and 11% global disease burden from maternal and child undernutrition;
• Paper 2 : Poor fetal growth or stunting in first two years leads to large negative consequences in later life;
• Paper 3: Maternal and child nutrition interventions could prevent quarter of child deaths in poor communities;
• Paper 4: 80% of world’s undernourished children live in just 20 countries;
• Paper 5: The international nutrition system: fragmented, dysfunctional, and desperately in need of reform;

Full text of the papers can be read online at The Lancet, following free registration to the website. A dedicated website supporting the series is at www.globalnutritionseries.org where you can find key resources such as:

• About the Series: Information on Series authors, The Lancet, and the papers
• Global Events: Events are being planned in Ethiopia, West Africa, Peru, Vietnam, India, London, and Washington, D.C. Find out more about these events and how you can get involved
• Media Center: Members of the media can access press announcements, background materials, and submit interview requests
• Resource Center: Access reports, research, and more on maternal and child undernutrition

The series was launched simultaneously at events in London and Washington DC:

• Go here to listen to keynote speakers at the London launch including Dr Denise Coitinho, of WHO, seconded to WFP, and UNICEF's Dr Bruce Cogill, IASC Global Nutrition Cluster Coordinator.
• The presentation in DC was broadcast on the web and will be available shortly here. Also available is the powerpoint used by Prof. Robert Black, Chairman, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
  

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What Are You Doing Right Now?

World Vision Australia is helping 20 million people to break the cycle of poverty. Still the fact is every three seconds one child dies from preventable causes. One child every three seconds...what are you doing right now?

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US Senate plans $600m p.a. in long-term food aid

Reuters reports on a new US Senate plan that would steer more US food aid funds to development projects that "attack the root causes of hunger":

"In one key change, the plan would set aside $600 million a year, about half the amount appropriated in recent budgets for emergency food aid, to provide a third more support for programs to improve farming techniques in poor countries or teach mothers about childhood nutrition.
"Ellen Levinson, who heads an alliance of aid groups that receive U.S. commodity donations and sell them in developing countries to fund those programs, said the change would help wean chronically hungry countries from dependence on food aid."

However, the bill is also a locus for a complex web of competing issues and special interests which, says Reuters:

"...also sidesteps an entreaty from the Bush administration, which this year revived a long-sought plan to allow up to a quarter of emergency food aid to be bought in the developing world instead of shipping US crops overseas.
"The plan was billed as a way to make assistance more efficient, especially important in an era of soaring crop prices and steep fees for shipping grain across oceans.
"A government watchdog found this year that overhead consumes about 65 percent of US emergency food aid funding."

Read the full article here.    Read more...

Ending famine... by ignoring the experts

The International Herald Tribune reports on the extraordinary turnaround in Malawi from the brink of famine to exporter of food to its struggling neighbours:

'In Malawi itself, the prevalence of acute child hunger has fallen sharply. In October, the United Nations Children's Fund sent three tons of powdered milk, stockpiled here to treat severely malnourished children, to Uganda instead. "We will not be able to use it!" Juan Ortiz-Iruri, Unicef's deputy representative in Malawi, said jubilantly. Farmers explain Malawi's extraordinary turnaround — one with broad implications for hunger-fighting methods across Africa — with one word: fertilizer. [...]

Malawi's "successful use of subsidies is contributing to a broader reappraisal of the crucial role of agriculture in alleviating poverty in Africa and the pivotal importance of public investments in the basics of a farm economy: fertilizer, improved seed, farmer education, credit and agricultural research."    Read more...

Maternal HIV and child undernutrition link to child mortality

A recent study to be published in the December 2007 edition of the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes sought to examine whether maternal HIV disease stage during pregnancy and child malnutrition are associated with child mortality. Low maternal hemoglobin concentration and child undernutrition were found to be related to an increased risk of mortality in this cohort of children. The study concludes that the "prevention and treatment of undernutrition in children remain critical interventions in settings with high HIV prevalence."    Read more...

Malnutrition and gender equality in India

"KOLARAS, India, 30 Oct 2007 -- When nine-month-old twins Devki and Rahul were brought by their mother to the Nutrition Rehabilitation Centre in Kolaras -- located in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh -- Rahul was a normal weight and size for his age, yet his sister Devki weighed just over half of what she should have. Devki's condition was the result of severe malnutrition. Both babies showed such varied weight and health that doctors suspected less food was given to Devki, a common occurrence in some areas of India where boys are often given more attention than girls."

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Nepal: Street children sniff glue to ward off hunger

UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs's IRIN news service reports on a dangerous practice gaining currency among the hungry street children of Nepal's capital, Katmandu:

Bhim Pariyar huddled in a corner with other boys like him, all trying to warm themselves around the fire they had made by burning plastic, paper and tyres.
“It’s time for fun now,” Pariyar told his friends as he took out the packet of dendrite [ a carpet glue].
“You know, this helps us to get rid of our hunger,” explained his friend, 14-year-old Rajen Subba, who ... cannot afford regular food or clothing to keep warm, and has been living on the streets for the past six years. [He] complains of chest pain and often gets sick. [...]
The adhesive glue contains toluene, a sweet-smelling and intoxicating hydrocarbon, which is neurotoxic. The solvent dissolves the membrane of the brain cells and causes hallucinations as well as dampening hunger pangs, and wards off cold.
“I forget everything. I won’t feel cold and hungry and can sleep easily,” said Shyam Tamang, 12, another street boy.

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Swaziland asks itself: food or biofuel?

OCHA's news service IRIN (Integrated Regional Information Networks) reports on disturbing dilemma facing developing countries trying to establish better food security: food or biofuels?

MBABANE, 25 October 2007 (IRIN) - The government of Swaziland announced this week that it would be allocating thousands of hectares to a private company to cultivate cassava for biofuel. About 40 percent of the country's one million people are facing acute food and water shortages.
"The cassava ethanol project has restarted the debate on how the country should use its agriculture land," said Sipho Mthetfwa, an agriculture extension officer in Shiselweni Region in the south of the country.
"The quick answer is, 'to grow food for the people', but government's stance is that we need to develop industry and new markets so people can collect wages and buy food, because traditional agriculture is too undependable."
As oil prices soar and biofuel production becomes more attractive, especially to poor countries, a global debate is raging over the possible impact on food security.
By placing the cassava project in drought-affected Lavumisa, in southeastern Shiselweni, where agriculture has been limping along for years, government is attracting criticism that it favours exports over food security at home.
"This year's drought has been nationwide, but drought has hit Lavumisa for 15 years," said Mthetfwa. "There are mostly small landholder farmers here - they are too poor to buy inputs for irrigation. And don't talk to them about alternative, drought-tolerant crops - they don't want to grow anything other than maize ... [which] has not grown well in years."

Time for cassava
Cassava is drought-tolerant and productive in poor soils, and has traditionally been grown by poor farmers in marginal areas. Between 1961 and 1995, cassava production for human consumption rose by 50 percent in Africa and 70 percent in Asia, the leading producer of cassava-derived starches, which are now being fermented to produce biofuel, according to the FAO.
Liquefied cassava starch is fermented from two to four days using a yeast, sometimes in combination with a bacterium. "A basic production plant - peelers, graters, fermenters and a distiller - can produce about 280 litres of 96 percent pure ethanol from a tonne of cassava with 30 percent starch content," the FAO says on its website.
The Swazi government is allocating unirrigated land to a local concern called USA Distilleries, which makes molasses from the sugar cane grown in the eastern lowveld but is based in Big Bend, a town 60km north of Lavumisa. The company is investing more than US$5 million in the biofuel project, which is expected to generate 700 jobs in an area that has remained undeveloped since the country's independence in 1968.
USA Distilleries declined to comment on its new venture but more details are expected to be released after the environmental impact assessment has been completed.
"The ethanol made from cassava will be sold overseas, where there is a ready market," said Lutfo Dlamini, Minister of Enterprise and Employment, who announced the arrangement this week.

Cautious response
The proponents of prioritising food security over revenue from biofuel cite government's efforts in the 1990s to encourage small-scale farmers to form cooperatives to grow the "cash crop", sugar cane, rather than food. When sugar prices started falling three years ago the cooperatives went bankrupt. "If we had grown vegetables for the market we would be in business today," said Abner Dlamini, a member of a cooperative that was dissolved in 2005.
Florence Dube, a food aid worker in Manzini, the main commercial town, said, "There is a need for food today. Food prices are so high that this is an investment as worthy as ethanol. If the fields of Lavumisa can be irrigated to grow cassava, they can be irrigated to grow food for people."
''The quick answer is, 'to grow food for the people', but government's stance is that we need to develop industry and new markets so people can collect wages and buy food, because traditional agriculture is too undependable''
However, a source at the ministry of enterprises pointed out that "This company is a distillery and not a food processor. It can only do the business it does. Creating jobs at a place where there are absolutely none right now is one way of addressing the food crisis."
The ministry of agriculture also declined to comment on the project, but said it was pursuing irrigation schemes aimed at small-scale farmers on communal Swazi Nation Land, where 80 percent of the population lives.
Mfomfo Nkhambule, a member of parliament who has been critical of government attempts to cultivate sugar cane rather than staple foods, has raised his concerns in parliament, but few oher politicians have commented on the food crisis.
"As long as the WFP [World Food Programme] and others are providing food, there seems a lack of urgency," a local newspaper columnist commented.

Skewed priorities
Agriculture extension officer Mthetfwa said the cassava ethanol project illustrated a similar skewing of priorities. "We cannot depend on food aid to come to us indefinitely ... from what I hear, the donors are wondering why we are not doing more for ourselves with the resources we have."
Treasure Maphanga, the director of the Esicojeni Foundation, a child hunger alleviation programme run by business and civil society, commented at a press briefing this week, "I am angry at the fact that, with all the human and natural resources, this country still depends on food handouts. We have an opportunity to correct the situation by the involvement of all people in the fight against the dependency syndrome."
At the beginning of 2007 the WFP projected that 220,000 people would be in need of assistance in Swaziland, but has since increased this figure to 365,000 beneficiaries receiving assistance from October 2007 until the next harvest in April 2008.

Read the full article here.
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Wondrous Plumpynut: "like penicillin for malnutrition!"

The push for scaling up the use of Plumpynut, the promising new RUTF, got a huge boost when US TV network CBS aired an 11 minute feature this week on "60 Minutes" by high-profile journalist Anderson Cooper. Cooper asks:

"... Why are so many kids dying? Because they can't get the milk, vitamins and minerals their young bodies need. Mothers in these villages can't produce enough milk themselves and can't afford to buy it. Even if they could, they can't store it -- there's no electricity, so no refrigeration. Powdered milk is useless because most villagers don't have clean water. Plumpynut was designed to overcome all these obstacles ... Plumpynut is cheap, nutritious and needs no refrigeration. It is saving starving children in the developing world and could save more … if there were more of it."

To watch the full story click here. And below is an audio transcript of the story:

A Life Saver Called "Plumpynut"
Oct. 21, 2007
(CBS) You've probably never heard a good news story about malnutrition, but you're about to. Every year, malnutrition kills five million children -- that's one child every six seconds. But now, the Nobel Prize-winning relief group "Doctors Without Borders" says it finally has something that can save millions of these children.
It's cheap, easy to make and even easier to use. What is this miraculous cure? As CNN's Anderson Cooper reports, it's a ready-to-eat, vitamin-enriched concoction called "Plumpynut," an unusual name for a food that may just be the most important advance ever to cure and prevent malnutrition.
"It's a revolution in nutritional affairs," says Dr. Milton Tectonidis, the chief nutritionist for Doctors Without Borders.
"Now we have something. It is like an essential medicine. In three weeks, we can cure a kid that is looked like they're half dead. We can cure them just like an ntibiotic. It's just, boom! It's a spectacular response," Dr. Tectonidis says.
"It's the equivalent of penicillin, you're saying?" Cooper asks.
"For these kids, for sure," the doctor says.
No kids need it more than a group of children 60 Minutes saw in Niger, a desperately poor country in West Africa, where child malnutrition is so widespread that most mothers have watched at least one of their children die.
Why are so many kids dying? Because they can't get the milk, vitamins and minerals their young bodies need. Mothers in these villages can't produce enough milk themselves and can't afford to buy it. Even if they could, they can't store it -- there's no electricity, so no refrigeration. Powdered milk is useless because most villagers don't have clean water. Plumpynut was designed to overcome all these obstacles.
Plumpynut is a remarkably simple concoction: it is basically made of peanut butter, powdered milk, powdered sugar, and enriched with vitamins and minerals. It tastes like a peanut butter paste. It is very sweet, and because of that kids cannot get enough of it.
The formula was developed by a nutritionist. It doesn't need refrigeration, water, or cooking; mothers simply squeeze out the paste. Many children can even feed themselves. Each serving is the equivalent of a glass of milk and a multivitamin.
To see the impact it's having, 60 Minutes drove for 12 hours from Niger's capital to a remote village, where every week Doctors Without Borders hand out Plumpynut. After sleeping in a field under mosquito nets, Cooper and the team awoke at sunrise to find mothers emerging from the fields. Many had walked for hours in the dark, along treacherous paths, avoiding scorpions, spiders and poisonous snakes.
Rivers of women flowed into the site and within minutes there were more than a thousand of them, all waiting to get packets or tubs of Plumpynut. In a land where plastic bags are a luxury, they carry the food home in their scarves, their hands, or simply stacked on top of their heads.
"When you see some of these kids they don't look sick. They don't look malnourished. They don't have bloated bellies or little stick arms," Cooper remarks.
"The ones that we're used to seeing on TV, that's the worst of the worst of the worst. It's the tip of the iceberg. And then below that, there's the iceberg. So, there's a whole spectrum of malnutrition," Dr. Tectonidis says. "And when we go and check these kids, well, they're way off in height or in weight. They're way off."
Niger has become Plumpynut's proving ground. A daily dose costs about $1; small factories mix it here and in three other African countries. Tectonidis says other companies could make similar products wherever children need them.
"There's many countries in Africa now saying, 'We want a factory. We want a factory.' Well let's give it to them," he says. "We just have to focus on these areas. We don't have to feed the whole world. We have to go for the jugular. Where are they dying? Where are they wasted? That's where we have to intervene. If you feed them well until they're two or three years old it's won. They're healthy, they can get a healthy life. If you miss that window, it's finished."
In Niger, most children need help now during what's called the "hunger season," just before the new harvest. Old food supplies have run out and about all that's left is millet, a basic grain women pound for porridge. But millet doesn't have enough nutrients to keep kids alive; in America we use it as birdseed.
Normally a children's hospital 60 Minutes visited would have more patients than beds. But now, thanks to Plumpynut, it has empty beds. Dr. Susan Shepherd, a pediatrician from Butte, Mont., runs Doctors Without Borders in Niger.
She says children that would have been hospitalized in the past can now be treated at home. "The reason we can do that is because we can give children Plumpynut here in the ambulatory center, and they take a week's ration home. Moms treat their children at home and come back every week for a weight check," Dr. Shepherd explains.
That's what Sahia Ibrahim has been doing. She's already lost four children to malnutrition. Now her six-month-old twins, Hassana and Husseina, are malnourished and she's worried they might die too. So she's been coming to the hospital for Plumpynut.
Hassana, at six months old, weighs only seven pounds. While that's what a newborn should weigh, the little girl has put on a pound in just a week thanks to Plumpynut.
Children are weighed and measured at the distribution sites. They're also examined to make sure they don't have any serious infections.
Malnutrition destroys a child's immune system, so they're more susceptible to diseases and less capable of recovering from them.
"Often these kids aren't even hungry. It's the opposite. They are anorexic because of the deficiencies they have. They lose their appetite," Tectonidis explains.
That's what happened to Mansour Miko and Maroufee Mazoo. Less than a year old, they had stopped eating and became listless and weak -- so weak that when their mothers brought them to get Plumpynut, the nurse put them in a van and sent them straight to the hospital. Three days later however, they were smacking their lips on Plumpynut, almost ready to go home.
"Have you seen kids who were on the brink of death brought back by Plumpynut?" Cooper asks.
"Oh, yeah, for sure. Again and again and again and again," Dr.Shepherd says.
But not always. Sometimes parents wait too long before bringing their child to doctors. 60 Minutes found Rashida Mahmadou in intensive care, barely clinging to life.
Rashida's condition was very serious. Her skin was literally peeling away -- one side effect of malnutrition, as skin becomes thin, pliable, cracks easily, and bacteria invade.
Just two hours later, Rashida's little heart stopped beating. She was just 19 months old.
"She died of severe, acute malnutrition," says Shepherd, who says she sees this happening every day.
Asked how she deals with so many kids dying, Shepherd tells Cooper, "It breaks your heart. It can break your spirit. It can ruin your confidence in your ability to be a good doctor. And it is sad. And I carry memories of many, many children with me and I'll carry them with me for my entire life. But you certainly cannot indulge yourself in that kind of sadness. We need to do something about this."
If Plumpynut is the answer, how come kids are still dying?
"The answer is getting to kids earlier," Shepherd says. "Once children are as sick as she is, Plumpynut is not gonna save her."
Rashida was buried in a nearby cemetery. The grave digger, Salifu Ibrahim, told 60 Minutes he used to dig graves for about seven children a day, but now, on most days, he digs only one.
Asked why he thinks fewer children are dying, Ibrahim says, "It is God's will."
God's will and Plumpynut.
Two years ago this region had the highest malnutrition rate in Niger. But now, after widespread use of the Plumpynut, it has the lowest. Dr.Shepherd told Cooper they'll be able to treat more than 120,000 kids this year, up from just 10,000 children three years ago.
What about peanut allergies?
"We just don't see it," Shepherd says. "In developing countries food allergy is not nearly the problem that it is in industrialized countries. It's hard to imagine a less industrialized country than Niger. On a list of 177 developing countries, the United Nations ranked Niger dead last -- least developed. More than 70 percent of the people don't know how to read. Most work in the fields and earn less than a dollar a day. Nomadic goat herders still roam this land -- their children and their kids travel by camel. Goats seem to be the main garbage disposal, but clearly the goats are falling behind. You can still spot a skinny guard dog, but we were told all the cats have been cooked.
In the countryside, where 85 percent of people live, girls start marrying as young as 11 years old. By the age of 15 most are wed, and by 16 most have already become mothers. The average woman here will give birth at least eight times in her lifetime. But largely because of malnutrition, one in five of their children will die before they reach the age of five. Of those who survive, half will have stunted growth and never reach full adult height.
But now, with Plumpynut, more children are surviving and thriving.
"And kids are doing better. Moms say their child's skin is brighter. Their appetites are better. And they're less sick. You know, what more could you ask for," Shepherd remarks.
Doctors Without Borders is asking for more of this type of food. Their success in Niger proves, they say, that fortified ready-to-eat products, like Plumpynut, save children's lives. Dr. Tectonidis says if the United States and the European Union were willing to spend part of their food aid on this, more companies will start taking it.
"Even by taking a miniscule proportion of the global food aid budget, they will have a huge impact, huge impact!" Tectonidis says. "We're not even asking for billions. It will solve so much of the underlying useless death. So we gotta do that now."
"It's useless death," Cooper remarks.
"Wasted life. Just totally wasted life for nothing. Because they don't have this product, little a bit of peanut butter with vitamins," Tectonidis says. "What a waste."

Produced By Robert Anderson and Casey Morgan
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