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The President of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, a physician/anthropologist, has announced that he will ‘name and shame’ countries that fail to tackle the malnourishment and poor growth of their children (Boseley 2016, 1). Kim is clear that ‘stunting’, that is, children with height considerably below the average for their age, is not only a humanitarian disaster but also an economic one. His position is that fetal malnutrition during pregnancy and early childhood leads to serious neurological deficits, particularly in toxic environments, where recurrent infections are common, and when infants are given little or no stimulation. Kim stresses that stunted women frequently give birth to children who become stunted, with the result that ‘Inequality is baked into the brains of 25 per cent of all children before the age of five’ (Boseley 2016, 1). Crude estimates suggest that stunted children in India approach 40 per cent, in Pakistan 45 per cent, and in DR Congo 43 per cent; hence, Kim insists, ‘the most important infrastructure we can invest in is grey matter’. He seeks to rid the world of stunted children by 2030 by donating conditional cash transfers to mothers of stunted children, thus enabling them to feed and stimulate their children through play. It is reported that a trial run in Peru worked well (Boseley 2016, 2).

Jim Yong Kim plans to repeatedly bring up ‘this stain in our collective conscience’ at World Economic Forums in the coming years. Clearly interventions to eliminate stunting are of enormous importance, but key socio/economic variables noted by Kim have been set to one side in his Peruvian project, including unremitting poverty, unequal distribution of land and other resources, and increasingly toxic environments. In addition to which is the violence and counterinsurgency so evident in that country, ably documented by the anthropologist Kimberley Theidon (2013). The horrendous effects of climate change must now be added to this list.