After more than a decade studying the wide-ranging effects of poor nutrition on children, former Wall Street Journal reporter Roger Thurow is outraged. Now he wants to inspire action.

Over the past decade, the number of undernourished people around the world has declined by around 167 million, to just under 800 million people. However, this positive trend glosses over a stark reality: Food insecurity is increasing in the world’s mountains. This pattern has been under-recognized by development experts and governments, a dangerous oversight with far-reaching social and environmental repercussions.

Specimens of goldenrod sewn into archival paper folders are stacked floor to ceiling inside metal cabinets at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. The collection, housed in the herbarium, dates back to 1842 and is among five million historical records of plants from around the world cataloged there. Researchers turned to this collection of goldenrod – a widely distributed perennial plant that blooms across North America from summer to late fall – to study concentrations of protein in goldenrod pollen because it is a key late-season food source for bees.

Between 2010 and 2015, Tanzania received more than $320 million in assistance via the U.S. government’s Feed the Future Initiative – the most of any country. But despite these commitments and an average of six to seven percent annual economic growth since 2000, Tanzania did not meet the first Millennium Development Goal: to reduce hunger and extreme poverty by half by the end of 2015.

Food security and proper nutrition are essential elements for the good health and wellbeing of individuals and communities. Proper nutrition increases productivity and subsequently helps lift families out of poverty. However, an estimated 800 million people are chronically malnourished across the world. Globally, more than 3 million children die each year due to illnesses caused by malnutrition.

In the long term, improving maternal and child health is as critical to national security as any problem in Pakistan today, said a panel of experts including Minister of National Health Services Saira Afzal Tarar at the Wilson Center on September 9.