Malnutrition in the first years of life can be a major obstacle to growth because it has serious consequences on health and the development of cognitive abilities and potential.

The most drastic consequence of hunger is starvation. This condition occurs due to the lack of nutrients that human beings receive through food and generates extreme physical weakness.

Chances are good that if you picture what hunger looks like, you don’t summon an image of someone like Christina Dreier: white, married, clothed, and housed, even a bit overweight. The image of hunger in America today differs markedly from Depression-era images of the gaunt-faced unemployed scavenging for food on urban streets. “This is not your grandmother’s hunger,” says Janet Poppendieck, a sociologist at the City University of New York. “Today more working people and their families are hungry because wages have declined.”

In the United States more than half of hungry households are white, and two-thirds of those with children have at least one working adult—typically in a full-time job. With this new image comes a new lexicon: In 2006 the U.S. government replaced “hunger” with the term “food insecure” to describe any household where, sometime during the previous year, people didn’t have enough food to eat. By whatever name, the number of people going hungry has grown dramatically in the U.S., increasing to 48 million by 2012—a fivefold jump since the late 1960s, including an increase of 57 percent since the late 1990s. Privately run programs like food pantries and soup kitchens have mushroomed too. In 1980 there were a few hundred emergency food programs across the country; today there are 50,000. Finding food has become a central worry for millions of Americans. One in six reports running out of food at least once a year. In many European countries, by contrast, the number is closer to one in 20.

In a country mired in a protracted crisis with multiple open fronts, attention to malnutrition among the little ones is a priority to build the future.
When taking a picture of Haiti's problems, the main problem arises: where to start? The capital, Port-au-Prince, an anthill of shacks and waterlogged buildings and with garbage scattered throughout (almost) all its districts, summarizes many of them well.

A century ago, our country was one of the most prosperous in the world thanks to the impulse of immigrants; today, despair expels the

April 13, 202200:10THE NATION

The cost of the basic food basket (CBA) experienced a year-on-year increase of 52.2% until February of this year and will exceed that record when the March cost of living index is known today, which threatens to arrive with record levels of increase. According to the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (Indec), a typical family, with two children, needed income of 37,413 pesos to acquire the minimum amount of food and not fall into destitution. But the total basic basket (CBT), which rose by 6.6% in February alone, stood at 83,807 pesos, below which a family can be classified as poor.