Profit before nutrition makes you sick

The world’s food systems are “deeply dysfunctional” and society is paying an exorbitant price for a diet of processed food that ignores human beings’ real nutritional needs.

This is the damning conclusion in a new report from Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food.

For the past half century, food production has soared in quantity, whilst the quality of our diet has got worse. The twin curses of malnutrition and obesity have been actively promoted by subsidising grain, soya and meat production at the expense of fruit and vegetables.

Between 1961 and 2009, while fruit and vegetable production increased 332%, world oilseed production increased by 610% and meat production increased 372%. Over roughly the same period (1963–2003), developing countries increased the amount of calories they consume from meat (119%), sugar (127%) and vegetable oils (199%), and industrialised countries also increased vegetable oil consumption (105%).

Whilst emergency aid concentrates on getting calories and protein to people, in the long term what communities need is access to fresh fruit and vegetables that provide “micro-nutrition” essential for health. These can only be provided by good local food and farming infrastructure.

This is being actively undermined by governments that focus on big agriculture, cash crops for export, or even sell off land to foreign investors who will use it to grow more of the foods that are already making us sick.

About 34% of children in developing countries, 186 million children in total, have a low height for age, the most common symptom of chronic under nutrition.

Although food costs declined from the early 1960s until 2002, “the poorest are still too poor to feed themselves in dignity because agriculture has not been designed to support the livelihoods of the most vulnerable and marginalised groups”, the report states.

The export of the US diet to the rest of the world is causing a growing public health crisis. More than a billion people worldwide are overweight and at least 300 million are obese. Overweight and obesity cause 2.8 million premature deaths per year, and 65% of the world’s people live in a country where obesity kills more people than hunger.

Globally, diets have become increasingly energy-dense and rich in sugar, salt and saturated fats, as many higher fibre foods are replaced by heavily processed foods. This means that today‘s children could have shorter life expectancies than their parents.

This globalisation of the unhealthy “supermarketised” diet, which we have experienced very powerfully in free market Britain, is having a negative impact everywhere now. The report is very clear that we must urgently switch to a “sustainable diet”, defined as one which is

• low in environmental impact
• contributing to food and nutrition security
• protective and respectful of biodiversity and ecosystems
• culturally acceptable,
• economically fair and affordable;
• nutritionally adequate,
• safe and healthy
• optimising natural and human resources.

The report concludes that the food system must turn away from an exclusive focus on boosting production and instead look towards “integrating the requirements of the adequacy of diets, social equity and environmental sustainability. All these components are essential to achieving durable success in combating hunger and malnutrition”.

De Schutter’s deeply researched report says that nutrition initiatives can be strengthened by “by being integrated into broader national strategies for the realisation of the right to food”.

But this is the exact opposite of the current system which profits the corporations and is supported by their client governments, even with subsidies from taxpayers. Subsidies applied in the wrong place mean that a healthy diet is more expensive than a poor diet in many countries. Putting profit before nutrition is making us sick, leaving healthcare system to deal with the consequences of corporate greed.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

Capitalism feeding off hunger

A capitalist perfect storm has ended all progress in reducing world hunger, and one billion people are now undernourished – 925 million more than before the economic crisis began. In every country, prices are soaring, including in the UK where food prices have risen by 22% in the last three years.

The crisis has been caused by the cumulative effects of:
• An expansion of commodity speculation in food products and land, including the poisonous hedgers and futures traders
• A year of extreme weather, from drought to floods
• Loss of agricultural land to bio-fuels, and urbanisation
• The collapse in purchasing power of the poorest people due to the economic slump.

Commodity speculators have moved strongly into food, betting on shortages and pushing up prices in a world where the food supply is increasingly globalised.

True, the wheat crop will be 30m tonnes lower than last year – a 5.5% decrease, due to drought in China, the heat wave in Russia and the floods in Pakistan. But stocks are not so low that prices could not be kept at a reasonable level. However that would assume a rational economic and trade system – and we are a million miles away from that. The market price of wheat and maize soared by 30% in just a few weeks.

In Russia, the price of buckwheat – a popular staple – has tripled. World meat prices – dependent on grain prices – are at a 20-year high. Egyptians can no longer afford their own basic diet of bread, cheese, tomatoes. Sugar and rice prices are at an all-time high.

According to the UN food price indicator (a figure based on a statistical analysis of 6 key commodities) prices have not reached the 2008 high of 199 – when there were food riots across the world – but they are heading in that direction at 188. The figure increased 14 points in 2010.

Governments across the world are preparing for social uprisings – already 12 people died last month in riots in Mozambique. But those same governments have facilitated the system that has led to the food crisis.

UN special rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier de Schutter, says a combination of environmental degradation, urbanisation and large-scale land acquisitions by foreign investors for biofuels is squeezing land suitable for agriculture.

According to the World Bank, more than one-third of large-scale land acquisitions are intended to produce agro fuels. It is this loss of local agriculture that causes shortages – and not population increases.

Meeting in Rome, the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation’s committee on world food security (CFS) established a panel of experts to look at the “causes and consequences of food price volatility, including market distorting practices and links to financial markets, and appropriate and coherent policies, actions, tools and institutions to manage the risks linked to excessive price volatility in agriculture."

This panel will have as much success in changing the system as the International Panel on Climate Change has had in persuading governments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; or experts working with the Convention on Bio-diversity have had in stopping the corporations destroying the planet’s eco-system.

The unsustainability of capitalism itself is the real problem, and the food crisis is a systemic, not a sporadic crisis. If we allow a system driven by profit and speculation to keep control of the world’s land use and agriculture, we will face famine on a scale not seen before.

Rioting and looting could well result as food prices rise out of reach. But these are not solutions. The real need is for a transformation in the ownership of land, the way food markets operate, the development of local food and the sharing of expertise and knowledge in a not-for-profit framework. That means grasping the opportunities offered by capitalist crisis to go beyond protest to democratising ownership, production and the political system itself.

Penny Cole
Environment editor