Rio+20 Conference
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 20-22 June 2012
Zero Hunger Challenge
The United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon launched a ‘Zero Hunger Challenge’ during the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development to scale up efforts to end hunger, including a special focus on malnutrition in pregnancy and early childhood. Malnutrition is a major underlying factor in maternal and child mortality. According to the 2012 Countdown to 2015 report, released earlier this month, It it is estimated that one in four of the world’s children are stunted and that malnutrition is the cause of the death of 2.6 million children annually. The Zero Hunger Challenge seeks to tackle key risk factors associated with malnutrition among pregnant women and children including stunting, poor health and neonatal deaths.
The five main objectives of Zero Hunger Challenge include:
- Achieving 100 percent access to adequate food all year round.
- Ending stunting among children under two by ending malnutrition in pregnancy and early childhood.
- Ensuring sustainability of all food systems.
- Increasing growth in smallholder productivity and income by 100 percent, particularly for women.
- Achieving a zero-rate loss or waste of food.
The initiative will bolster efforts by countries, business, civil society and the scientific community to ensure universal access to nutritious food in the first 1,000 days between the start of a mother’s pregnancy through the second year of life.