Report: The business case for investment in nutrition

This new report from Chatham House: the Royal Institute of International Affairs, published on 8 July 2020 and written by a group of authors including Laura Wellesley, aims to reveal the hidden costs of malnutrition for business, and the extent to which these costs are recognized and addressed by multinational companies (MNCs). It finds that businesses in ‘low- and middle-income’ countries collectively lose between USD130 billion and USD850 billion a year through malnutrition-related productivity reductions, equivalent to between 0.4 per cent and 2.9% of those economies’ combined GDP.

According to the report, the costs are likely to be much higher. The model developed by Vivid Economics for this report looks only at the direct costs of certain forms of malnutrition in the adult workforce in terms of reduced productivity. It does not explore the costs of impaired cognitive development and low educational attainment resulting from undernutrition in childhood, or indirect costs such as paid sick leave for malnutritionrelated illness. The study therefore estimates only a share of the total costs, yet still finds that these are in the hundreds of billions of dollars each year. Despite these substantial impacts, companies apparently routinely overlook or underestimate the cost of malnutrition to their operations and are failing to spot the opportunities to drive action to improve diets and related health outcomes.

Previous research has looked at the impacts of poor nutrition on health systems or society at large, but the effects on businesses have gone largely unexplored.