The Copenhagen Consensus – How to Feed the Hungry – Article by Zach Richardson
Zach Richardson
The Goals
There are 17 goals in The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, a resolution adopted by U.N. Member States in 2015 to help guide country-wide decision making and provide a shared vision to work with. The first 3 of these goals are to end poverty, end hunger, and ensure health for all people, everywhere.
It is common for leaders to try to make large lofty-sounding promises that have delivery dates far in the future. They get the credit, accolades, and photo opportunities now, while actual implementation on or delivery of the promises is dealt with later by someone else.
It is now 2025, and 10 of those 15 years have passed, and there is one organization that is saying, “Alright everyone, we’d better actually start working on implementation if we want to get close to hitting these targets.” That organization is a think tank called The Copenhagen Consensus (TCC).
The core philosophy of TCC is that there are no solutions in economics, there are only tradeoffs. If there is a certain amount of money to be used and we want to squeeze every last ounce of goodness out of each penny we spend, we’re best off focusing on realistic targets that have a high “ROI”, so to speak.
Regarding SDG 2, ending hunger, if we were to focus on one target, it should be what is called “stunting”, which is when a fetus/child does not receive enough nutrients in the first 1000 days after conception, and ends up permanently shorter. But that “stunting” also includes “stunted brain development”. With reduced neuronal/cortical development come poorer concentration, worse grades, and lower scores on tests of cognitive development.
A specific target of SDG 2 is to reduce stunting by 50% by 2030. The trendline shows us about 36 million children short of that goal if we don’t make some changes:
One major cause of stunting is a lack of many micronutrients during gestation. These are vitamins that are needed in small quantities for health. Right now most governments already have infrastructure to provide pregnant mothers with folic acid and iron as per WHO requirements, and multivitamins are mass-produced such that providing coverage for the last two trimesters of pregnancy comes out to just $1.55 per pregnant mother, with another $1.12 per mother needed in terms of educational programs about the importance of their use.
Simple supplementation would reduce the risks of stillbirths, early births, and lower birth weight. TCC estimates a massive 38x ROI for the supplementation of these vitamins due to the fact that early births and lower birth weight due to malnutrition would prevent a nearly 5-point loss of IQ, leading to the children being more economically productive and less likely to be dependent.
After birth, children in the 6-to-23-month window are most often lacking essential fatty acids and proteins, which is where another TCC intervention comes in: SQ-LNS. This stands for “Small Quantity Lipid-based Nutrient Supplements” and are small 20-70 g packages of lipids and nutrients that can be easily transported and shelf-stable.
The costs of the SQ-LNS supplements is $2.79 per child per month, with a separate but equally crucial $2.23 for the costs of logistics and distribution, or a total of $5/month/child. For a birth cohort of 41 million children, this totals $3.7 billion. This will avoid 155,000 deaths for a benefit of $45.7 billion. Getting the SQ-LNS to all 41 million would would avoid stunting for 1.5 million, meaning being more developed, studious, and socially productive, reflecting in higher wages of $5875 per child. TCC analysis showed this would result in $5.4 billion in productivity. Sum totals showed $51 billion in benefits for a little under $4 billion annually, a phenomenal ROI.
Between the supplements, education, distribution, and SQ-LNS, we’re looking at a cost of $1.2 billion to get back $22 billion, which has a cost-to-benefit ratio of 18.
The reason I like these proposals is they seem to have concrete numbers behind them, and seem to directly address a specific target of the UN’s SDGs, but they do so with a focus on solving the problem in the most efficient manner, at minimum cost, which I believe makes the solution most palatable to world leaders, and therefore most likely to receive implementation.
In summation, while some say there is enough food to everyone, they often don’t seem to have a solid explanation for how the leftover Brussels sprouts on my plate are going to make it into a hungry mouth in Sudan. Moreover, government support requires manageable targets. With 5 years left until the 2030 SDG target needs to be reached, TCC provides a compelling case on how to handle a specific hunger target, with a specific amount of money, by a certain date.
Zach Richardson is the Director of Publication for the U.S. Transhumanist Party. Learn more about him here.
