Dominican Republic: Child malnutrition costs Central American countries and the Dominican Republic as much as US$6.7 billion (?5 billion) a year in lost productivity and elevated health care costs, according to a U.N. report released Monday.

Hunger also kills scores of children and causes thousands more to grow up with mental and physical defects, the report by the U.N. World Food Program and Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean said.

Some 880,000 children in those countries are currently underweight _ almost 15 percent of all children in the region, researchers said. Those who survive to adulthood have often failed school and developed costly and debilitating diseases.

''Child hunger is a moral question, but as this report demonstrates it is also a critical economic concern. Its conclusions are a call to action,'' U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said in a statement issued from the Organization of American States meeting in Panama.

The report used data from 2004, the most recent year for which full statistics were available, said World Food Program spokesman Alejandro Lopez-Chicheri.

Some 52.9 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean are malnourished, Lopez-Chicheri said.