The United Nations Decade of Action on Nutrition and the instructive lessons that can be drawn from FAO’s 1960s Freedom from Hunger Campaign

As a global socio-medical problem, nutrition has had a complex history. Since the humanitarian discovery of hunger in the nineteenth century, through the rapid professionalization of the science of nutrition in the twentieth century, to its subsequent incorporation into the global policy agendas, nutrition has, until recently, been regarded as penury’s sibling. The concept of malnutrition is commonly used to refer to undernutrition caused by deprivation. However, this is changing. The global explosion of obesity and overweight is changing the face and profile of malnutrition, which now runs the gamut between feast and famine. Recent global expert reports indicate that global hunger continues to rise, with the number of hungry people now standing at an alarming figure of 821 million (one in every nine people).