Fat’s Heavy Burden on the World Economy

Jomo Kwame Sundaram was the Coordinator for Economic and Social Development at the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), Rome, and received the 2007 Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. By Jomo Kwame SundaramKUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Mar 14 2016 (IPS)About 2.1 billion people are regarded as overweight or obese today, or almost thirty per cent of the world’s population. With over 800 million people estimated to be chronically hungry in the world, it appears that the number of overweight is more than 2.5 times the number of undernourished. Jomo Kwame Sundaram. Credit: FAOLast year’s Second International Conference on Nutrition, organised by the FAO and World Health Organisation (WHO) in Rome last November, was criticised for exaggerating the extent as well as human and economic burden of malnutrition. Instead, the new numbers from a 2014 McKinsey Global Institute report suggest that the Conference instead erred in the opposite direction, at least by underestimating the extent of obesity.The last estimate from the WHO was around 1.5 billion overweight, with a third of them obese. This implies an increase of about 40 per cent over just a few years! In the UK alone, for instance, 37 per cent of the population is deemed overweight and a quarter obese.Economic burden The overweight, especially the obese, impose a heavy economic cost equivalent to 2.8 per cent of world economic output, or about USD$2 trillion, according to...
Source: IPS Inter Press Service - Health - Category: Global & Universal Authors: Tags: Asia-Pacific Conferences Featured Food & Agriculture Global Headlines Health North America Population Source Type: news