My friend Peter Greaves, who has died aged 89, was a health and nutrition officer for Unicef whose work made a huge difference to children’s lives around the world. He was an early advocate of low-cost interventions including immunisation, oral rehydration and breastfeeding.
While he was Unicef’s chief nutrition adviser in the mid-1980s, he managed to get Unicef and the World Health Organization to agree on the final draft of The Ten Steps to Successful Breastfeeding. This document helped transform global maternal care policies.
Born in Cardiff, the son of Methodist missionaries, Stella (nee Cox) and Lionel Greaves, Peter spent much of his early childhood in Kenya. He boarded at Kingswood school, Bath, then went to Jesus College, Cambridge, to study biochemistry, graduating in 1955. This was followed by a PhD in nutrition at the Royal Free hospital, University College London – and a crash course in tank-driving during national service in Germany.
From 1959 he was in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), for two years, as a senior scientific adviser at the East African Institute for Medical Research, before moving back to London to work at the British Nutrition Foundation.
He joined the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in 1969, working first in Cairo, and then in Beirut as a health and nutrition officer. After three years working as the FAO adviser to Unicef New Delhi, he left that organisation to join Unicef full-time, where he spent the rest of his working life.
In 1980 Peter became Unicef’s regional officer for South America in Brazil. There he set up a programme for street children in Rio, providing them with education, part-time work, a safe place to sleep and a hot meal. He also launched a highly successful breastfeeding programme. In 1983 his team developed a primary healthcare plan to tackle the appalling infant mortality rate in the poorest Brazilian state, Maranhão, resulting in a 33% reduction in infant mortality. The programme was taken up by the Brazilian government and extended across the whole country.
He moved in 1984 from Brazil to the Unicef HQ in New York as chief nutrition adviser. His colleague Margaret Kyenkya-Isabitye recalled: “He was the backbone, the glue, that held the nutrition section together.”
Peter’s commitment to good causes did not stop on his retirement in 1992. He joined the United Nations Association, which is how I met him, and campaigned on many issues, including climate change, and wrote regular letters to national newspapers (including his last one, published in the Guardian in November 2021). In the words of his son, Tim, “he is undoubtedly one of those rare people who has left this world a better, a more generous and kinder place than he found it”.
He is survived by his wife, Chloe (nee Morgan), an actor whom he married in 1957, Tim, a daughter, Kate, and four grandchildren.
