Child food poverty harms all children, but it is particularly damaging in early childhood when insufficient dietary intake of essential nutrients can cause the greatest harm to child survival, physical growth, and cognitive development, trapping children and their families in a cycle of poverty and deprivation.

Last week, UNICEF released a new report that highlights alarming levels of child food poverty due to inequity, conflict, and climate crises. 

Titled ‘Child Food Poverty: Nutrition deprivation in early childhood’, the report examines the status, trends, inequities and drivers of child food poverty in early childhood.

The report warned that millions of children under five have difficulty accessing nutritious and diverse diets necessary for developmental growth and that food prices and living costs have hit record-high levels as countries continue to recover from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Its authors say that child food poverty harms all children, but it is particularly damaging in early childhood when insufficient dietary intake of essential nutrients can cause the greatest harm to child survival, physical growth, and cognitive development, trapping children and their families in a cycle of poverty and deprivation.

The report says that globally, one in four children are living in severe child food poverty in early childhood, amounting to 181 million children under five years of age.

Progress towards ending severe child food poverty is slow. A severe child food poverty is experienced by children belonging to poor and non-poor households, indicating that household income is not the only driver of severe child food poverty.

Children living in severe child food poverty are missing out on many nutrient-rich foods, while unhealthy foods are becoming entrenched in the diets of these children, the report says.

Severe child food poverty is driving child undernutrition: the prevalence of severe child food poverty is three times higher in countries with a high prevalence of child stunting.

Millions affected worldwide

UNICEF Nutrition Specialist, Harriet Torlesse, who was also a lead writer on the report, said one in four children globally are surviving on extremely poor diets, consuming just two or fewer of the major food groups. 

“For a child in Afghanistan, for example, that’s just some bread or perhaps a milk in the whole day, and almost certainly no vegetables and fruits and no good sources of protein,” she told UN News ahead of the launch. “And this is very troubling because these children cannot survive in such poor diets.” 

The report found that 65 per cent of the 181 million children worldwide experiencing child food poverty reside in 20 countries – about 64 million are in South Asia and 59 million are in sub-Saharan Africa.

Even further, nearly half of all cases are linked to households where income poverty is prominent.

However, many other factors fuel this crisis, including “food systems that fail to provide children with nutritious, safe and accessible options, families’ inability to afford nutritious foods and parents’ inability to adopt and sustain positive child feeding practices.”

The report says that the global food and nutrition crisis and localized conflicts and climatic shocks are intensifying severe child food poverty, especially in fragile countries.

More than half of children in Somalia experience child food poverty amid conflict and natural disasters. 

‘Horrific impact’ of Gaza conflict

Similarly in Gaza, nine out of 10 children are dealing with high levels of food poverty as fighting continues.

“This is evidence of the horrific impact the conflict and restrictions are having on families’ ability to meet children’s food needs – and the speed at which it places children at risk of life-threatening malnutrition,”  the report stated.

However, it noted that other countries dealing with their own crises, like Burkina Faso, significantly reduced their levels of child food poverty. Burkina Faso has halved the number of cases there.

“It shows that with the right type of action, countries can make progress, including low-income countries,” Ms. Torlesse said. “[These countries] have all made a deliberate effort to improve the supply of local nutritious foods, be it pulses or vegetables or poultry.” 

UNICEF appealed for action to make nutritious foods more accessible for young children, activate social protection systems to address income poverty and leverage health systems to deliver necessary nutrition services to assist children.

“UNICEF is calling on all governments, development and humanitarian partners to act now to prioritise actions to end child food poverty,” Ms. Torlesse said. “We must position the elimination of child food poverty as a policy imperative, particularly to achieve the sustainable development goals of malnutrition.”

She said it is also important for health systems to be strengthened so that they can advise and support families on how to feed their children. “There’s no reason why children should grow up in child food poverty,” Ms. Torlesse said. “Not when we know the consequences for children’s abilities to grow and thrive and especially not when we have the solutions and we know what works.”