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Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of WHO, said Wednesday that he expects an increase by nearly 14 percent in the number of children suffering from malnutrition this year, Reuters reported.
"We cannot accept a world where the rich have access to healthy diets while the poor are left behind," he said at the United Nations Food and Agriculture conference.
Tedros predicted most of the 6.7 million more children to become malnourished will live in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
UNICEF shared similar concerns in July. The organization warned 6.7 million children under the age of 5 could become undernourished due to the economic impacts of the coronavirus pandemic.
"[I]t is increasingly clear that the repercussions of the pandemic are causing more harm to children than the disease itself," said the executive director of UNICEF, Henrietta Fore, in the July press release.
"Household poverty and food insecurity rates have increased," she said. "Essential nutrition services and supply chains have been disrupted. Food prices have soared. As a result, the quality of children's diets has gone down and malnutrition rates will go up."
Many of these children are in danger of "wasting," or becoming so malnourished that they become too frail to perform daily tasks and suffer a greater risk of death, according to UNICEF.
A UNICEF report released in March showed that nearly 47 million children were wasting in 2019, prior to the pandemic.
Comment: And food poverty is not limited to subsaharan Africa, because even before the lockdown, families slipping below the poverty line in the supposedly 'developed' nations like the UK and the US have been relying on food banks and school dinners to keep their children fed. The lockdown has significantly exacerbated this problem by causing interruptions to the food supply, leading to food shortages and price rises, add to that soaring unemployment, school closures, and the soaring number of children in poverty are seeing some of their only sources of nutrition cut off: