BySASHA STEVENSON, HANNAH DAWSON –

Poor nutrition not only costs individuals dearly by stunting their potential, but the country too.

More than half of our population is hungry or at risk of hunger. That’s more than 20-million people facing the daily terror of a clawing stomach with little hope of filling it.

In the face of these numbers, national hunger may appear to be an intractable problem, so large and desperate that the task of finding solutions is overwhelming, and any solutions devised will inevitably be inadequate and too expensive to implement.

But in assessing the potential costs of any solution to hunger, we often forget the huge cost of our inaction: the cost of hunger itself. Taking action to ensure the realisation of the right to food is both a constitutional obligation and an economic imperative. This is because, as well as being a frightening human condition, hunger and malnutrition are a limit on human and economic potential.

Read full article here