The export of grain from Ukraine may have slowly resumed recently, but the malnutrition problem is still persistent in many African countries. The youngest victim of the war is Plumpy’Nut, a high-calorie, fortified peanut butter paste that could save the life of a malnourished child. Rising costs of ingredients and distribution mean that the red and white colored bags are becoming more and more expensive. If the product becomes even more expensive, hundreds of thousands of children could be helped less.
Manufacturer Nutriset has increased the price of the bags by 23 percent since May last year, with 9 percent of that price increase being directly caused by the war in Ukraine. In a letter the company sent to its customers, it said the effects of the war have increased the costs of ingredients and transportation by as much as 39 percent.
Plumpy’Nut paste is called RUTF by NGOs, ready-to-use therapeutic food. The mixture was invented in 1996 by André Briend. For years, the French nutritionist searched in vain for a good way to mix as many nutrients as possible, until he experienced a eureka moment at the kitchen table, inspired by a jar of Nutella: what if he made a paste with all the necessary ingredients?
Until Briend’s invention, ‘F100’ was the standard in the emergency power supply world. However, this mix of dried milk, vitamins and minerals had to be mixed with clean drinking water, which is not or only poorly available in many places where malnutrition occurs. In addition, F100 was not very tasty, making it difficult to give to children. Briend mixed the F100 formula with peanuts, milk powder, sugar, vegetable oil and minerals and vitamins.
Briend’s pasta turned out to be revolutionary. This was mainly because the bags are easy to use and easy to transport. In addition, they have a long shelf life and can be stored outside the refrigerator. That makes the paste-like substance ideal for aid organizations, which distribute the bags to severely malnourished children between the ages of 6 and 24 months. They are also widely used in strengthening clinics, to which children with acute malnutrition are referred.
Nutriset, the French company Briend has partnered with, is still the largest manufacturer of the product. The company says it helped 9.7 million children last year. According to Nutriset, all profits are invested in nutritional research and the Plumpy’Nut patent is available for a token price.
Dangerous moment
“The war in Ukraine is impacting the costs of RUTF and the delivery of our programs in many ways,” said Siméon Nanama, UNICEF’s West and Central Africa nutrition consultant. Unicef annually buys almost 80 percent of the world’s stock of RUTF, making it the largest buyer in the world. A colleague of Nanama . told AFP news agency that distributing the bags will cost $12 million more than it would have cost before the war in Ukraine.
According to Nanama, the price increase comes at a dangerous time for many African countries. “It comes on top of the serious lack of food security created by years of conflict, climate change, drought and the impact of Covid,” he says. “As a result, the worst affected countries are seeing the rate of severe childhood malnutrition rise, and we predict it will only get worse.”
The United Nations Children’s Fund expects the price of emergency food to rise by another 16 percent in the coming months as a result of the war in Ukraine. That would mean that 600 thousand fewer children could be fed, with all the consequences that entails.
Increased Demand
One of the countries hardest hit by the effects of climate change, among other things, is Somalia, where dry rainy seasons cause acute malnutrition. According to the Somali branch of aid organization Save the Children, 1.7 million children are malnourished, 400 thousand of whom are in serious condition.
‘Last year, one box of 150 bags of food cost 35 euros,’ says Binyam Gebru, deputy country director of Save the Children in Somalia. “Now that’s 44 euros.” Gebru’s organization purchases from the French Nutriset, which means that the emergency food that Save the Children distributes must come from France. ‘Instead of four months, it now takes six months for the product to arrive here,’ says Gebru. ‘That is due to the increased demand, but also to a lack of containers and congestion at ports.’
Locally produced
However, the prices of RUTF bags made by African manufacturers are also skyrocketing. Because of the war in Ukraine, milk, grain and vegetable oil suppliers are being called upon, who previously mainly supplied ingredients for the bags, says Riaan Oosthuizen, director of the South African RUTF manufacturer GC Rieber Compact. ‘That meant a huge increase in the cost of raw materials.’ For Oosthuizen, the prices of both oil and milk powder, which became more expensive mainly because of expensive animal feed, have now almost doubled.
Dhiren Chandaria and his daughter Nikita, who make pouches in Kenya with their company Insta Products, have also seen their import and transport costs rise sharply. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my 40 years in business,” said CEO Dhiren Chandaria. ‘The prices charged by transport companies are seven times higher than before. It’s ridiculous, I can’t imagine that the fuel has become so much more expensive.’ In addition to price speculation, many companies are also affected by the high energy prices, which have risen sharply due to the war in Ukraine, according to Chandaria.
New recipes
Riaan Oosthuizen is trying to develop new recipes for his RUTF products in South Africa. That is difficult, he says, because the end product must meet high quality requirements. ‘Malnourished children have a very weak immune system’, Oosthuizen explains, ‘which means that a pathogen such as salmonella can be deadly.’ The production of RUTF therefore takes place under strict hygienic conditions, ‘adjacent to pharmaceutical level’.
For that reason, many RUTF producers are still highly dependent on imported raw materials, such as milk and peanuts. For a few years now, Kenyan Insta Products has therefore been trying to collaborate with communities in the northern Turkana region. There, the company invests in small-scale farms that grow peanuts. But that region too was recently hit by extreme drought.
“We found that the peanut harvest was necessary for many people in Turkana to get through the worst period,” says Nikita Chandaria. ‘They could eat a lot of their peanuts themselves. We are now seeing that the harvest in those areas can alleviate the effects of rising food costs a bit. People in rural areas feel the effects of inflation much more than we do in cities.’ At the same time, this means that Insta Products gets less peanuts from Turkana to use in its RUTF products.
Other African producers are already using locally produced peanuts, according to UNICEF adviser Siméon Nanama. ‘We are working with the private sector to develop new products that use a different source of protein than milk,’ he says. There are also tests in which peanuts are replaced by ingredients such as sorghum, a grain that is readily available in many places in Africa. “We hope that we will soon have other options that are less expensive but just as effective at combating malnutrition and saving children’s lives.”