Giving Globally: Feeding the 900 Million

There is a good but sobering reason why "ending world hunger" has been a perennial hope of beauty-pageant contestants at least since Miss America contestants began naming that as their greatest wish: we haven't come close to doing it. This year some 900 million people—including 178 million children under 5—are suffering from malnutrition, estimates the United Nations; every day 50,000 starve to death. As the world community scans the horizon for solutions to world hunger, it is seeing visions of amber fields of genetically modified grain. Just as the development of high-yielding rice and other crops created the green revolution of the 1960s and saved tens of millions of people from starvation, so genetically modified crops are the great hope of the 21st century.

GM crops, however, are likely to feed about as many people as Miss America. A new report by agriculture experts from 60 nations foresees "a limited role for biotech crops" in reducing world hunger. (Biotech companies withdrew from the project in protest.) The problems? Yields for GM varieties, in which genes for desirable traits are spliced into a plant's DNA, are unpredictable and often lower than high-yield varieties bred without genetic engineering. GM seeds, which are patent-protected, cost more than the poor can afford (high-yielding varieties of the 1960s green revolution are not patented). The know-how and conditions required to cultivate GM crops hardly exist in Africa or South Asia, the world's hunger hot spots, where farmers can't even eke out subsistence yields of ordinary crops.

Low-tech aid, not cutting-edge science, therefore has the best chance of both feeding the malnourished today and setting farmers on a path to growing enough to eat (and perhaps sell) tomorrow. The adage says giving a man a fish lets him eat today but giving him a fishing rod lets him eat every day; the 900 million need both fish and rods. The most beneficial and cost-effective immediate aid? Providing micronutrients—vitamins and minerals such as iodine, zinc and iron—to kids. The Copenhagen Consensus, a group of economists who take a hard-nosed look at the costs and benefits of a variety of save-the-world proposals, concluded in May that providing vitamin A and zinc supplements to malnourished infants and toddlers under 2 would cost $60 million annually. That would bring a return in lives saved, diseases averted and cognitive benefits gained of just over $1 billion. Providing iron and iodized salt would cost $286 million a year, with benefits of $2.7 billion. Doctors Without Borders is launching a campaign to provide a fortified supplement—it's a sort of spread—that is packed with the required nutrients and, crucially, does not require refrigeration.

The embrace of micronutrients represents a radical change for food aid. …