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

Corporate locusts leave hunger behind

Since 2006, corporations and countries have spent $30 billion buying up 20 million hectares of fertile farmland – an area that equates to a fifth of all the agricultural land in the European Union. The chief culprits of this obscene land grab are countries that accumulated massive surpluses from the boom in oil prices and in the export of consumer goods.

Saudi Arabia and Qatar are using their oil wealth and China, the income from huge trade surpluses, according to figures from the International Food Policy Research Institute. The Saudis have created a corporation, Foras, specifically to buy up land to grow rice. It is financed by the Islamic Development Bank, the Saudi government and private investors. Over a seven-year period, Foras aims to produce seven million tons of rice on 700,000 hectares of land in Senegal and Mali; it already has a rice farm in Mauritania. Other target countries are Sudan, Uganda and Niger.

The Ethiopian government has seized nearly 3 million hectares of land from its own people and put it up for sale to foreign companies or governments (in this instance, countries and corporations are virtually indistinguishable). This is a huge part of the country’s fertile land, and is happening when millions of Ethiopians are threatened with malnutrition and possibly starvation as a result of low rainfall.

The number of Ethiopians who need emergency food aid rose from 4.9 million in January to 6.2 million in June. There are famine alerts in Ethiopia, Burkina Fasso, Somalia, Senegal and Kenya. The UN's World Food Programme (WFP) says 3.8 million Kenyans are at risk and in need of emergency food aid.

All over the world the poorest people are beginning to suffer from hunger, following a 50% rise the price of staples in the last six months. In the United States the percentage of people suffering “food insecurity” ranges from 6% of the population in wealthier states to as high as 15% in poorer parts of the country.

Global food stocks are low; drought, hurricanes, floods, late rains and failed rains have ruined crops in many parts of the world. High oil prices have raised the price of fertilizer, leading to lower yields. And of course land is being turned over to bio-fuels.

This crisis shows not only capitalism’s rapaciousness, but also its failure as a system of human economy. The so-called “green revolution”, which was implemented from the 1950s onwards in countries like India, was meant to solve hunger and lead to self-sufficiency. So why are countries like Ethiopia now seeking to outsource food production?

The application of vast quantities of fertilizers, herbicides and insecticides (a system the World Bank still seeks to impose on Africa, and which the land grabbers will also use) is an abject failure and will wreak ever greater havoc on already fragile eco-systems.

What we are witnessing is the steady erosion of the world’s fertility overall. Agri-business claims its methods are based on an advanced understanding of farming; but this is not the case. It is based on a narrow capitalist short-term approach, which takes into account neither the past nor the future but only the productive and profitable present. Moving locust-like across the globe, the agri-corporations leave desert behind them.

To achieve an end to hunger, requires first a revolution in land ownership and second, a significant transformation in the way we relate to nature, where we continuously restore fertility by recycling waste products and applying them to the soil. If the cost of farming in this way leaves no room for private profit, then we should transform the corporations into non-profit co-operatives.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

Health advances under threat

Climate change is “the biggest global health threat of the 21st century”, according to the report of a year-long joint study by the University College London Institute for Global Health and the medical science magazine The Lancet. The gains made in the 19th and 20th centuries – countering infectious and pest-borne diseases, reducing malnutrition, improving infant and maternal mortality levels – could not only be lost, but put into reverse.

Summarising current research, the report sets out the threats to health and lives:

Hunger, illness, stunted growth and death due to under nutrition are set to worsen as climate change affects crops, forestry, livestock, fisheries, aquaculture, and water systems. Increases in extreme weather events will damage crops and disrupt farming. Sea level rise and flooding of coastal lands will lead to salination or contamination of fresh water and agricultural lands, and the loss of nursery areas for fishing. Drought, and changing patterns of plant and livestock diseases and pest infestations, reduction of income from animal production, decreased crop yields, lessened forest productivity, and changes in aquatic populations will all affect food production and security. The regions most likely to be adversely affected are those already most vulnerable to food insecurity and malnutrition

.

Populations with no immunity will be exposed to new infections such as malaria, and dengue fever. One model suggests that up to 320 million more people could be affected by malaria by 2080. As ocean temperatures rise, increased plankton blooms could provide nutrients for the cholera virus. Flooding brings outbreaks of diarrhoea, leptospirosis and cryptosporidiosis.

Current public health systems could not respond to these challenges and of course the most vulnerable people are in poor countries with minimal health infrastructure. A new advocacy and public health movement is called for to bring together governments, international agencies, non-governmental organisations, communities, and academics from all disciplines to adapt to the effects of climate change on health.

You can see where these public health specialists are coming from. They want a return to the pioneering days of public health, for example when in 1854, John Snow (the father of public health) tracked the source of a cholera outbreak around Broad Street in London to an infected water supply. This marked the beginning of a struggle for the transformation of water and sewage which remains the bedrock of health in Britain. Then there were the studies that connected rickets and tuberculosis with poverty, which led to poor children getting free milk.

None of these struggles were won by researchers and doctors alone, but by campaigns involving individuals and groups, including trade unions and working people’s associations. Achievements were made in the teeth of opposition from vested economic and political interests.

The report’s authors acknowledge that, so far, climate change has been viewed “only through the lens of economics”, with no sign that governments are mobilising the professional, civil and social forces needed to respond. But the “lens” in question – or rather, the tunnel vision of globalised corporations in pursuit of profit – is the only vision that governments have.

Taking on the vested interests of agri-business, Big Pharma, and all the energy-guzzling corporate giants who are preventing action on climate change, means bringing scientists and doctors together with the rest of civil society to create an unstoppable movement for change. Just as Snow and his supporters had to go to war against the establishment to make gains in public health in the past, so today’s passionate advocates will find it impossible to achieve what is required without a transformation of the status quo, not only in but also beyond, health care systems.

Penny Cole
Environment editor