Peanut paste helps battle hunger in Africa

Michel Lescanne lifts the lid of a giant mixer that stirs peanut paste, sugar and a special vitamin mix into a sticky cream at his small village factory in northern France.

The brown paste, known as Plumpy’nut, has become an elixir of life for tens of thousands of African children.

Aid agencies say it is a huge leap in the fight against hunger, because infants can eat the sweet-smelling paste - with all the nutritional value of traditional milk formula - at home, rather than in hospital.

“We wanted a product that doesn’t need to be mixed with water and fulfills all nutritional needs,” Lescanne said at the factory in a picturesque village as workers filled Plumpy’nut paste into cereal bar-sized packages.

“We also believe food should taste good. Maybe that’s a French thing.”

After making milk formulas and other food products for use in humanitarian crises, he hit on the idea for the paste after a colleague had Nutella chocolate hazelnut spread for breakfast.

Plumpy’nut came out some seven years ago but production has risen sharply in recent months after food crises in Sudan’s Darfur region, and now in Niger, put it in the spotlight.

Lescanne said about 250,000 children will be fed this year with Plumpy’nut - a name combining plump and peanut - compared with 100,000 in 2004.

Hundreds of women at feeding centres run by aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) in Niger receive sachets of it for their children, many of whom had been living on leaves or grass after harvests failed because of drought and locusts.

Spooning the brown paste from the foil packets into their infants’ mouths, they say their malnourished children can stage surprisingly fast recoveries with medical attention from MSF doctors, who prescribe the food.

“Her neck swelled up, then she started coughing,” said Zahira Hussein, nursing her 13-month-old daughter in the feeding centre in Tahoua in the northeast of the West African country.

“Before she couldn’t even sleep, now she’s doing better.”

EASY TO USE

Milton Tectonidis, a nutrition specialist for MSF, says Plumpy’nut allows aid groups to reach more malnourished people because children can eat it straight from the packet.

Traditional milk powder formulas need to be mixed with water, he says. But as clean water is often not available to families in crisis regions, sick children spend weeks having hospital treatment and are fed with such products.

“Hospital treatment requires lots of staff and equipment,” he said shortly after his return to France from Niger.

“We can reach maybe three to five times more children.”

Now only 30 percent of malnourished children need to stay in clinics, with the others eating Plumpy’nut at home, he said. The risk of illnesses being transmitted in hospital also falls.

“The product is fantastic. It can enormously increase our coverage,” said Frances Mason, a nutrition advisor for Save the Children, adding that Plumpy’nut also helped families.

“Mothers would have had to spend four weeks in hospitals with an ill child and leave their other children at home.”

“MAKE IT AT HOME”

Lescanne’s Nutriset firm, which is also making products such as a vitamin mix for homeless people, sells to non-governmental organisations or U.N. agencies.

Lescanne said profits were reinvested in research and development and put into humanitarian products.

“I won’t use any of that money to make a sports energy bar. That is our justification,” he says.

In its niche, Nutriset has few rivals, and the 50-staff company expects turnover to reach 15 million euros in 2005, a 50 percent increase on last year. It will produce some 2,500 tonnes of Plumpy’nut this year.

“It’s extremely simple to make because the idea is to have it produced by developing countries,” Lescanne said. “This is not NASA. You can make this at home with a mixer.”

Nutriset aims to move production to countries where the product is needed. Three factories have been set up in Malawi, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Niger, and four are being planned in other African regions.

The African factories receive material and training from Nutriset and are obliged to buy the special vitamin and mineral mix that is central to Plumpy’nut. The other key ingredients, such as peanut paste, can be produced at home.

In Malawi, about a tonne of Plumpy’nut is already being made each day - enough to feed some 4,000 children.

Save the Children’s Mason cautioned that food safety standards at the African sites had to be checked carefully, but said local production could help cut costs.

“It could even be a boost to the local economy, depending on how much is being produced,” she said.

MSF’s Tectonidis says the fact that Plumpy’nut is so simple to use should give a new impetus to development policies.

“It opens the way for new kinds of intervention during emergencies, but also for work in countries with chronic food deficits,” he said, calling on governments to implement sustainable strategies to act on long-term food crises.

“These products show that there are fewer and fewer excuses not to become active.”

More than 800 million people have too little to eat to meet their energy needs worldwide, U.N. agencies say. Over a quarter of children under 5 are malnourished in developing states.

“The product can be a quantum leap if UNICEF and governments make use of it and react,” Tectonidis said. “If we continue to just say the product is magnificent, it would be a shame. It has more potential than that.”

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