UN: Malnutrition costs up to 5% of world GDP

Up to 5 per cent of global economic output may be lost due to malnutrition, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said Tuesday, noting that increasing obesity was compounding chronic undernourishment problems. The direct health care costs and long-term damage from lost productivity could amount to 3.5 trillion dollars per year, or 500 dollars per person, dpa quoted the Rome-based agency as saying in its yearly The State of Food and Agriculture report. "That is almost the entire annual gross domestic product of Germany, Europe's largest economy," FAO noted in an accompanying statement. FAO said last year that 12.5 per cent of the world's population - 868 million people - did not have enough to eat in 2010-2012, down from 23.2 per cent in 1990-1992. That estimate showed the international community coming close to meeting a key prescription of the UN's Millennium Development Goals (MDGs): halving the percentage of the world's hungry from 1990 levels by 2015. But the UN agency warned Tuesday that the malnutrition crisis was much wider, indicating that there were 2 billion people suffering from nutritional deficiencies and 1.4 billion overweight people, including 500 million obese. FAO's director general, Jose Graziano da Silva, called for "concerted and coordinated action on health, sanitation, education, gender equality, environment sustainability and social protection" to improve the situation.