Frontline medical workers say the latest impact of the war in Ukraine is a dramatic price rise in an emergency treatment used to save the lives of starving children. A high-calorie peanut paste called Plumpy’Nut is used by medical staff across the world as the first response to save a severely malnourished child.
But rising prices, scarcity of ingredients and problems with distribution mean that the red and white bags are becoming increasingly expensive just as need is rising, with millions of children facing hunger in east Africa alone.
Read more about the paste and the challenges of producing it (even within Africa) in my latest piece for The Guardian. A Dutch, more in-depth version of the story appeared in newspaper De Volkskrant.
