160 Million Children Worldwide Suffer Stunted Growth Due to Hunger, FAO Official Says

MOSCOW, July 8. /TASS/. Around 160 mln children worldwide suffer stunted growth due to hunger. In addition, every 10 seconds, a child somewhere in the world dies either from hunger or its consequences, director of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Liaison Office with Russia Oleg Kobyakov told TASS in an interview.

"Every 10 seconds, a child in the world dies either from hunger or from its consequences - diseases caused by hunger. That is 3 mln lives a year, a very tragic figure. As of last year, 160 mln children worldwide suffered from stunted growth," he said.

Kobyakov stressed that if a child is undernourished in the first years of life, the damage to their physical development and cognitive abilities cannot be reversed later in life.

At the same time, progress is visible on a number of health indicators under the nutrition-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). There is steady positive momentum in breastfeeding among infants under six months of age and in reducing nutritional anemia among girls and women of childbearing age.

Significant progress has been achieved in reducing child and infant mortality: from 2000 to 2024, it fell by more than half. However, in 2025, the figure - 4.8 mln children who did not live to see their fifth birthday, or one child dying somewhere in the world every six seconds - remains unacceptable, while the gap between the most and least developed countries is 20-fold or more, Kobyakov concluded.