MUSIC: "Our World" theme
Straight ahead on "Our World": Progress toward resolving world hunger, a peanut butter solution for malnutrition in Malawi, an explosion of respiratory illness in Asia and the nuts and bolts of the new environmental politics:
TED NORDHAUS: "Even as several billion people on the planet are going to be living modern lives, the challenge is a very different one. We have to go build and create an entire different new clean energy economy."
Addressing global warming through innovation, invention and investment? that and engineering plants to eat toxic waste. Hi! I'm Rosanne Skirble sitting in for Art Chimes. Welcome to VOA's science and technology magazine, "Our World."
Two newly published surveys reflect the state of global poverty and suggest steps to alleviate the burden of hunger and malnutrition in the developing world, where the problems are most acute.
One in seven people in the world go to bed hungry according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. That's 854-million people around the globe, including 150 million children under the age of five.
In 2000, leaders from 189 countries adopted a United Nations plan to cut extreme poverty and hunger. The U.N. Millennium Development goals aimed, by 2015, to cut hunger in half and child mortality by two-thirds.
To assess progress in this quest, the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute [IFPRI] uses a measure it calls the Global Hunger Index. It was developed by IFPRI researcher Doris Wiesmann, who says the Index shows that Latin America, the Caribbean and East Asia are on track toward reaching the U.N.'s hunger and child mortality goals.
DORIS WIESMANN : "We see Cuba on the top of the list. Of course we should not forget [that] in the early 1990s this country plunged into a crisis after the Soviet Union subsidies were withdrawn, but subsequently recovered. But there are other countries like Uruguay, Peru and other ones like the Fiji Islands that also have done relatively well when it comes to progress towards the Global Hunger Index [goals]."
According to the Index, most countries will not reach the U.N. Millennium targets if progress continues at current rates. Nine of the ten countries with the highest levels of hunger are in Sub-Saharan Africa.
DORIS WIESMANN: "We find that the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi have experienced the greatest setbacks, followed by Swaziland, Liberia and North Korea. But when we looked especially at the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi we know that these countries have been heavily involved in conflict for most of this time."
War and armed conflict contribute to malnourishment. But other factors like poverty complicate the picture. Wiesmann says breaking that cycle requires investment in agriculture and education, economic empowerment and available health care services for women.
DORIS WIESMANN: "For example, if mothers are undernourished and suffer from anemia it is likely that children (will be) born with low birth weights and have a bad start in life. So they will grow into underweight preschool children."
Wiesmann hopes the Global Hunger Index will help wealthy countries design more targeted foreign aid programs. She says the measure can also be a tool for government decision-makers and local community activists.
DORRIS WIESMANN: "For example, in Malawi, the journalists have interviewed ministers of agriculture and economic planning referring to the fact that Malawi didn't rank very well. So they were asking the government what they intended to do to improve the situation."
The impact of wealthy nations' policies on the world's poor is evident in another important measure called the Commitment to Development Index, published by the Center for Global Development, a Washington-based think-tank. On policies ranging from foreign aid, immigration, investment, and trade to the environment, security and technology, the annual survey rank 21 rich nations on how their policies impact poor countries.
David Roodman developed the survey. He says scoring adjusts for size, leveling the playing field for large and small nations.
DAVID ROODMAN: "The Netherlands comes in first and close behind are Denmark, Finland and Sweden. These Nordics [northern European countries] all do well in no small part because they give a lot of aid for their size."
The United States ranked 14th in part because U.S. foreign aid totals are low as a percentage of the nation's budget. On environmental development, Roodman says, the index puts the U.S. in last place.