"Sweet Tooth"

The following is a quote from my "Global Development Briefing" from the Development Executive Group:

Global Development Briefing -- Sweet Tooth

"We are actually promoting increased production of a product...which we know, according to the WHO, that we should be reducing in our diet."

— Neville Rigby of the International Obesity Task Force on a United Nations drive to cut sugar consumption and obesity in the West while funding sugar production in the Third World, as quoted by Reuters. The U.N. aims to limit sugar consumption to less than 10 percent of daily energy needs, but diets of many Western teenagers contain more than double that rate. At the same time, the World Bank promotes sugar growing among poor nations. The World Bank, calling sugar "the most policy-distorted of all commodities," is giving soft loans to poor countries, while the WTO is keeping up tariffs that bar Third World growers from key markets, he said. According to World Bank estimates, trade distortions in the sugar industry cause annual subsidies of $6.4 billion to Western producers, denying small growers a 40 percent increase in income.

And another tidbit, same source:

Rampant HIV, poor prenatal care and a raft of other preventable illnesses mean children born today in sub-Saharan Africa are less likely to make it to their fifth birthdays than children born a decade ago, the UN children's agency UNICEF said last week in a new report. Worldwide in 2002, the latest year for which reliable data is available, one in 12 children died before age 5, representing some 11 million preventable deaths each year.