“Our food systems are making people sick,” warned Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food, in March 2012 as he presented his report on nutrition to the UN Human Rights Council.
“One in seven people globally are undernourished, and many more suffer from the ‘hidden hunger’ of micronutrient deficiency, while 1.3 billion are overweight or obese.”
“Faced with this public health crisis, we continue to prescribe medical remedies: nutrition pills and early-life nutrition strategies for those lacking in calories; slimming pills, lifestyle advice and calorie counting for the overweight. But we must tackle the systemic problems that generate poor nutrition in all its forms,” the independent expert said.
“The right to food means not only access to an adequate quantity of food, but also the ability to have a balanced and nutritious diet. Governments must not abstain from their responsibility to secure this right.”
De Schutter identified five priority actions for placing nutrition at the heart of food systems in the developed and developing world:
- taxing unhealthy products;
- regulating foods high in saturated fats, salt and sugar;
- cracking down on junk food advertising;
- overhauling misguided agricultural subsidies that make certain ingredients cheaper than others; and
- supporting local food production so that consumers have access to healthy, fresh and nutritious foods.
“Urbanization, supermarketization and the global spread of modern lifestyles have shaken up traditional food habits. The result is a public health disaster,” the Special Rapporteur said.
“Governments have been focusing on increasing calorie availability, but they have often been indifferent to what kind of calories are on offer, at what price, to whom they are accessible, and how they are marketed.”
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The UN special rapporteur on the right to food says that one of the five key priorities for improving nutrition across the world is to support local food production so that consumers have access to fresh and healthy food. We know that the transport sector accounts for approximately 15% of overall greenhouse gas emissions. A recent article in Nature states that almost a third of threats to animal species around the world stem from damage to biodiversity caused by trade to meet the demands of richer nations.
Why then do the World Trade Organization and various United Nations agencies continue to promote trade – particularly the trade in food commodities – as a way for developing countries to prosper?
It looks to me as though rich consumers in the North are getting cheap food at the expense of the rest of the planet and of future generations!