FAO needs help with statistics about malnutrition
From Mr. Robert Johnston
January 28, 2008 
The Financial Times
Original Source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ed3ca06c-cd40-11dc-9b2b-000077b07658.html
Sir, It is well and good for the World Bank to nudge the Davos leaders towards greater attention to the appalling extent of global malnutrition (“http://www.ft.com/cms/s/ae0eb098-c9e8-11dc-b5dc-000077b07658.html \o www.ft.com Zoellick calls for fight against hunger to be global priority”, January 24), but it is a disgrace that the statistics that are essential for seriously addressing the problem are woeful. The best the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation can offer is earnest but highly contested and admittedly poorly based food insecurity estimates for years up to 2004.
While many UN offices and bilateral donors including the World Bank have put up millions of dollars in the last decade for partnerships with counterparts in national statistical offices to excellent effect, the FAO’s work in this field has received little or no internal or external support and its statistics office is in disarray. We know from thousands of excellent small-scale studies and research by non-governmental organisations that the nutrition situation for as much as a third of the world's population is poor, and worse, but we know next to nothing in global detail about about recent or long-term levels and trends by countries and regions of countries, or malnutrition's links to income and gross domestic product, for example.
If Robert Zoellick, the World Bank president, is serious about tackling global malnutrition, he could put some of the Bank’s formidable expertise and resources in statistics behind a global effort to overcome this inexcusable statistics oversight.
Robert Johnston,
New York, NY 10013, US
(UN Statistics Division, retired)