Cargill’s ‘Hunger Action Season’ aims to tackle child malnutrition for 15,000 Asian children

The ‘Hunger Action Season’ campaign seeks to help improve nutrition for around 15,000 children in Asia through employee-led activities in collaboration with 50 partners, including food banks, schools and charities.

Some of the activities to be carried out across the region include nutrition programmes and a donation drive to support 300 students from four rural schools in China; the distribution of food packets in Singapore to support families with children and elderly in low income areas; nourishing programmes for children in rural India addressing key nutrition and food security issues: and partnering with the Faculty of Veterinary at University of Airlangga to hold an egg and poultry consumption campaign in Indonesia to educate the benefits of protein consumption

The campaign also aims at raising awareness about the realities of children malnutrition amongst Cargill’s more than 50,000 employees in Asia and the communities they live in.

Fundamental responsibility

“Every year, 5.9m children die from preventable causes, nearly half of them due to malnutrition. Half of these children live in Asia. ​

“This is deeply concerning and as a global leader in food and agriculture, it is our fundamental responsibility to do our part and help children in the communities where we live and work in,”​ said Peter Van Deursen, CEO of Cargill Asia Pacific.

Globally, the company says it collaborates with partners in the public and private-sector to find long-term solutions to create a sustainable, food-secure world.

“Over the last five years, Cargill has contributed more than $105m to advance our priorities of food security, sustainability and nutrition – recently awarding an additional $13m to improve the lives of more than 1m people in 15 countries around the world by 2020,”​ it said.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 490m people suffers chronic hunger in the region, and Asia is home to almost 62 per cent of the world’s undernourished.

“This presents the challenge of ensuring food security in the context of growing and changing patterns of food demand as the world is projected to reach more than 9 billion by 2050 and food production will have to increase by 70% to keep pace with the changing demand,” ​Cargill added.