Starved for Attention: il cibo non basta

The international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and the VII Photo agency today launched “Starved for Attention,” a global multimedia campaign presenting a unique and new perspective of childhood malnutrition, a preventable and treatable condition that nonetheless claims the lives of millions of children each year.
The collaboration challenges established notions of malnutrition through a seven-part mini-documentary series; clichéd images are substituted with those of parents and health workers struggling to meet the nutritional needs of young, growing children. Starved for Attention highlights how increased childhood sickness and early death can be prevented with effective nutritional interventions. The campaign launch coincides with the onset of a particularly harsh “hunger gap” season in Africa’s Sahel region, the period when staple food crops run out before the next harvest and malnutrition typically increases.
VII photojournalists Marcus Bleasdale, Jessica Dimmock, Ron Haviv, Antonin Kratochvil, Franco Pagetti, Stephanie Sinclair, and John Stanmeyer contributed to Starved for Attention. They traveled to rural villages, war zones, teeming capitals, and mountain hideaways to document childhood malnutrition and its varied faces: the incongruity of malnourished children in lush and bountiful Congo; the cyclical nature of malnutrition in Bangladesh; the impact of the annual “lean season” in the Sahel. Highlighting successful treatment and prevention programs in countries like Mexico and the United States, Starved for Attention emphasizes the great potential for combating early childhood malnutrition.