Peanut butter feeds Malawi’s hungry children

A crunchy type of peanut butter is leading the way in nourishing starving children, in the Sub Saharan country of Malawi, claim aid workers.

Plumpy'nut Chiponde, known as Plumpy is a mixture, of peanuts, powdered milk, sugar, oil, vitamins, an animal protein and minerals. This mixture could have huge long term effects on hunger and malnutrition according to reports from United Nation news service, IRIN. Additionally, the ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF) is made at a factory in Malawi and given directly to mothers to give to their malnourished children.

Plumpy, the patent for which is owned by a French company, is being held as a revolution in the treatment of chronically malnourished children. Project Peanut Butter, a non-profit therapeutic feeding programme in Malawi, has just started clinical trials to test using one of the country’s biggest exports, peanuts, to help keep formula production costs low. Some 2,100 severely malnourished children are now being monitored in the study.The programme founded by Mark Manary, a professor of paediatric medicine at Washington University School of Medicine was the first to prove that RUTF could work.

The idea was pushed along after food prices started to rise last year in 2008, all food prices rose, so oil and peanuts increased their fraction of the cost. Milk became very expensive.The project's studies have shown that 95 per cent of malnourished children on the Plumpy formula recover from malnutrition in six to eight weeks.

According to Manary, 98 per cent of children keep up their recovery six months after treatment and 96 per cent maintain recovery over the course of a year. This is critical in Malawi, where 111 children out of every 1,000 die between birth and the age of five, one of the highest under-five mortality rates in the world. Manary's studies, the news service reports, show that Plumpy is a vast improvement on milk-based formulas, which had to be given out in hospitals. RUTF has made it possible to treat a child at home.

Milk powder donated by the Austrian government, through the United Nations World Food Programme, has helped project peanut to pass on a 30 per cent cut in price to the charities it supplies. The project has also begun production at a factory in Sierra Leone.

In Malawi, More than half the population lives below the poverty line. Tens of thousands of Malawians die of Aids every year. Most of those falling sick with Aid are young adults who normally responsible for feeding children and harvesting crops.

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children