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Malnutrition should be the world’s major priority for aid and development, a panel of eight leading economists, including five Nobel laureates, declared yesterday.

An introduction to the Copenhagen Consensus

Economists battle it out to rank possible solutions for the great challenges in global stability and security

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BACKGROUND

• Copenhagen Consensus: conflict

• Copenhagen Consensus: disease

• Copenhagen Consensus: global warming

• Copenhagen Consensus: hunger

• Copenhagen Consensus: terrorism

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• Times Online readers back nutrition

The provision of supplements of vitamin A and zinc to children in developing countries, to prevent avoidable deficiencies that affect hundreds of millions of children, is the most cost-effective way of making the world a better place, the Copenhagen Consensus initiative has found.

Three other strategies for improving diets in poor nations were also named among the top six of 30 challenges assessed by the project, which aims to prioritise solutions to the world’s many problems according to their costs and benefits.

Efforts to control global warming by cutting greenhouse gas emissions, however, were rated at the bottom of the league table, as the economists considered the high costs of such action were not justified by the payoffs. Research into new low-carbon technologies, such as solar and nuclear fusion power, was ranked as more worthwhile, in 14th place.

The previous Copenhagen Consensus, held in 2004, also listed global warming as its lowest priority. The exercise was organised by Bjorn Lomborg, the controversial Danish statistician who has long argued that though climate change is real, current approaches to fighting it offer poor value for money.

Dr Lomborg said: “This gives us the ultimate overview of how global decisions can best be made and how we can best spend money to do good in the world. Prioritising is hard. It’s much easier to say we want to do everything, but unfortunately we have limited resources. We don’t just focus on what’s fashionable, but also on what’s rational.”

The jury of economists chose to emphasise malnutrition, and micronutrient supplements in particular, because of the major effects that comparatively moderate financial investments could have.

Around 140 million children suffer from vitamin A deficiency, which can cause blindness, immune system problems and death, or zinc deficiency, which can stunt growth. Supplements of these nutrients, however, are both effective and extremely cheap – at 20 US cents per person per year for vitamin A and $1 for zinc.

For just $60m a year, it would be possible to provide capsules of both micronutrients to 80 per cent of undernourished children in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, with benefits worth more than $1bn. “Each dollar does more than $17 worth of good,” Dr Lomborg said.

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