'Forget climate change, we should spend on nutrition'

Mark Henderson, The Times 31 May 08;

Malnutrition should be the world’s major priority for aid and development, a panel of eight leading economists, including five Nobel laureates, declared yesterday.

The provision of supplements of vitamin A and zinc to children in developing countries, to prevent avoidable deficiencies that affect hundreds of millions of children, is the most cost-effective way of making the world a better place, the Copenhagen Consensus initiative has found.

Three other strategies for improving diets in poor nations were also named among the top six of 30 challenges assessed by the project, which aims to prioritise solutions to the world’s many problems according to their costs and benefits.

Efforts to control global warming by cutting greenhouse gas emissions, however, were rated at the bottom of the league table, as the economists considered the high costs of such action were not justified by the payoffs. Research into new low-carbon technologies, such as solar and nuclear fusion power, was ranked as more worthwhile, in 14th place.

The previous Copenhagen Consensus, held in 2004, also listed global warming as its lowest priority. The exercise was organised by Bjorn Lomborg, the controversial Danish statistician who has long argued that though climate change is real, current approaches to fighting it offer poor value for money.

Dr Lomborg said: “This gives us the ultimate overview of how global decisions can best be made and how we can best spend money to do good in the world. Prioritising is hard. It’s much easier to say we want to do everything, but unfortunately we have limited resources. We don’t just focus on what’s fashionable, but also on what’s rational.”

The jury of economists chose to emphasise malnutrition, and micronutrient supplements in particular, because of the major effects that comparatively moderate financial investments could have.

Around 140 million children suffer from vitamin A deficiency, which can cause blindness, immune system problems and death, or zinc deficiency, which can stunt growth. Supplements of these nutrients, however, are both effective and extremely cheap – at 20 US cents per person per year for vitamin A and $1 for zinc.

For just $60m a year, it would be possible to provide capsules of both micronutrients to 80 per cent of undernourished children in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, with benefits worth more than $1bn. “Each dollar does more than $17 worth of good,” Dr Lomborg said.

Douglass North, a Nobel prize-winning Professor of Economics at Washington University in St Louis, and a member of the expert panel, said: “It has immediate and important consequences for improving the wellbeing of poor people around the world - that’s why it should be our number one priority.”

Other important nutritional initiatives highlighted by the panel included fortifying food with iron, and salt with iodine, to prevent other avoidable deficiencies. Another highly-recommended solution, in fifth place, was breeding nutritionally enhanced crops, such as “Golden Rice”, a GM variety with added vitamin A.

A less glamorous issue made sixth place on the list – the treatment of worm infestations that are a common cause of malnutrition and disease. “As one of the experts said: ‘We’d rather the kids were benefiting from nutrition, and not the worms,’” Dr Lomborg said.

The economists’ second-place priority was removing subsidies and tariffs that exclude developing countries from western markets, as is currently being proposed in the World Trade Organisation’s Doha round of negotiations. While this is not a spending matter as such, but instead requires political agreement, it was considered so critical to growth in developed countries that it deserved a high placing.

Nancy Stokey, Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, said: “There was heated debate about whether Doha belonged to this list at all, because it is a matter of political will, not budgeting. But the potential benefits are so enormous, running maybe into trillions of dollars.”

“Models estimate the net benefits could be up to $3,000 billion, five sixths of which would benefit the developing world,” Dr Lomborg said.

Further high priorities included the extension of childhood vaccination, ranked fourth overall, and improvements to education, particularly for girls.

Efforts to control HIV with antiretroviral drugs, which was the top priority of the 2004 Copenhagen Consensus, finished lower down this time, in 19th place. This reflects improvements in the situation since 2004, such as the wider availability of cheap generic drugs following agreements with pharmaceutical companies.

The low priority given to mitigating climate change was criticised by environmentalists, who questioned the economic assumptions presented to the panel. They also argued that the case for containing emissions should not anyway be considered purely in terms of value per dollar spent.

Critics of Dr Lomborg’s position and the two Copenhagen verdicts, say he undervalues the impact of rising temperatures on biodiversity and ecology, which are hard to quantify in financial terms. Others say the economists’ calculations take too little account of the potential for catastrophic effects of global warming, and the threat posed by rising sea levels to whole societies, such as low-lying islands and countries like Bangladesh and the Netherlands.

Dr Lomborg, however, said mitigation alone offered poor value for money. “Spending a dollar would get back less than one dollar of good,” he said.

Economists on the panel added that mitigation of climate change will mainly require policy decisions and fiscal instruments, such as carbon taxes, rather than direct investment of the sort they were considering for issues such as malnutrition. “Most of what we would do does not involve spending public money,” said Thomas Schelling, Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland, another Nobel laureate.

The Copenhagen recommendation on climate change stands in stark contrast to the conclusions of a group of 1,700 scientists, including six Nobel laureates, who yesterday issued an open letter calling on the US Government to implement carbon emission cuts.

The table has been drawn up after a week of deliberations, during which the panel has heard presentations on ten global challenges - terrorism; conflict; malnutrition and hunger; education; the role of women; air pollution; subsidies and trade barriers; disease; sanitation and water; and global warming.

In each case, three leading specialists in the field were asked to make the case for particular solutions and present evidence on their costs and benefits. The economists were then asked to judge all these against one another, to come up with a list of priorities.

About a quarter of the 44 solutions originally presented to the economists were dropped from the final list, as the panel considered there was insufficient evidence to assess them properly. These included all five of the solutions offered to international terrorism, and four of the five for preventing conflicts and civil wars.