Yes, there are
more “World Days” in the year than there are actual days…but let’s hope today’s
words and actions strengthen and accelerate actions to tackle the growing
problem of obesity, across the world.
I was late in
reviewing the UK government’s National
Child Measurement Programme (NCMP) for the 2020/21 school year,
published at the end of last year. Covering children in Reception (aged 4-5
years) and Year 6 (aged 10-11 years) in mainstream state schools in England,
the report contains analyses of Body Mass Index (BMI) classification rates by
age, sex, ethnicity and geography.
The results were a huge shock, for two main reasons – the
trend and the growing disparity.
The worsening trend:
The stark disparity:
[note: based on BMI centile
above/below reference population using the British 1990 growth reference (UK90): BMI centile >=85 and <95: Overweight; BMI
centile >=95: Obese; BMI centile >=99.6 Severely obese]
We are learning
more and more each week about the ways in which obesity is generating chronic
diseases that sicken and kill people. Heart and lung disease, cancer,
depression, diabetes, dementia, auto-immune disease – the list is long, and
getting longer as research uncovers the links.
Humans have
never changed so fast.
We’re stepping
into unknown territory. We were adapted to forage and hunt and to find and
consume food when we could. Feasting in times of plenty allowed us to survive
in times of want…the latter a lot more common than the former. A strategy
dictated by (and suited to) the environment in which we lived. Evolution’s good
at that.
Now that the
food environment has change in an evolutionary nanosecond, our bodies and their
metabolic systems are struggling to cope. We’re maladapted. In a dangerous
place. What used to be an advantage – our ability to harvest and store calories
from whatever food we could find — has become a massive liability.
The scam of the century and the main reason obesity has rocketed is
the way in which the ultra-processed food (UPF) industry has figured how
to get people addicted to fake food and drink which they can mass-produce, incredibly cheaply.
The behemoths
of the food industry — companies like Nestle, Coca Cola, PepsiCo — each have
revenues larger than half the countries in the world. The top ten control 80%
store-bought products, with combined annual profits well over US$100 billion.
Ultra-processed foods are junk foods that are not really foods at
all. Ultra-processing involves adding more and more steps to the processing
chain, to add more and more profit. Sugar, salt, fat and carbs are combined
with emulsifiers, sweeteners, stabilisers and preservatives in ways that
maximise ‘bliss point’, ‘mouthfeel’, ‘flavour burst.’
The industry has developed a whole new language of addiction. It
has harnessed the biology of desire to generate products that exploit the
short-term, impulsive traits of our dopamine-wired brains. Cheap, addictive, long-lasting and four times more profitable
than real food, these fake foods are extremely dangerous.
Ultra-processed foods are not only dangerous to people, they also wreck the planet.
The
corporate playbook
When the
spotlight is turned on the UPF industry, and difficult questions are asked,
they have an array of tactics to respond, well-honed by Big Tobacco
who walked this path before them.
They are experts in the dark arts of distortion, dispute,
doubt, disguise, distraction, deflection and delay…
Lots of D words…
They
distort the narrative/problem (reframing it as one of individual
responsibility and/or physical inactivity), promote disinformation via carefully-cultivated
media connections.
They
dispute the science showing the multiple harmful
consequences of UPFs.
They
cast doubt on this research and often on the researcher/s who do these
studies – and they often pay biddable ‘scientists’ to do pseudo-research into
red herrings, and/or confer awards upon them.
They distract through ‘corporate
social responsibility’ campaigns and projects, and funding a few ‘good causes’.
Small-scale boutique projects and
the media froth they generate are designed to confer legitimacy on large-scale
core business practices that run in a very different direction. Nutri-washing, greenwashing, whitewashing,
sportswashing…you name it…they’re really into laundry!
They
deter and delay government regulation (bans, taxes etc) by promising to
regulate themselves (a scam within a scam), and by hiring lawyers to appeal
legislation. This buys them time for the other tactics to bear fruit.
They
disguise themselves by hiding within ‘non-profit’ front organizations
that have names that include the word ‘global’ or ‘sustainable’ or
‘development’. A Trojan-Horse tactic allows them to get to the policy table, by
proxy. Once there — whether in the main discussions, the corridor meetings or
the cocktail parties they throw – they get to make friends and influence
people.
Ultimately, they just want to be loved.
Being seen to be part of the nutrition and health community is a huge deal for
the UPF industry, as it confers tacit approval of their products and practices…a
highly valuable ‘get out of jail card’.
So, they target individuals — many
of whom have been offered thousands of dollars to write essays for their annual
reports – and they swarm around conferences. If you want to understand their
power, just look at the participants list for COP26 in Glasgow last year…just
look at the activity around the UN Food Systems Summit
before it.
It’s
like Dracula being asked to manage the new community blood bank.
The
latest ‘D word’ I’ve come across, and one of the most sinister, was described
in an excellent paper published earlier this week – the dark
nudge. Companies are now using artificial
intelligence (including social listening, facial recognition, augmented or
virtual reality) to alter products availability, to manipulate the position of
products on menus, and for a whole new approach to immersive marketing that is
targeted and aggressive.
These
tactics needs to be revealed, resisted and reversed. At all levels and by every
organization that’s serious about nutrition and health.
In
doing so, we need both carrots and sticks.
Governments need to regulate
malnutrition-generating companies, set parameters for their operation (using
policy, legislation, tax, regulations on labelling, advertising, ingredients),
and hold them accountable for harms they cause.
Civil
society needs to
continue to shine a light on harmful practices, challenge governments to do the
right thing, and work to generate wider public awareness of UPF harm.
Academia
and policy research
organizations need to get more involved in political economy research and in
studies of the commercial determinants of malnutrition. There is real scope for
stronger advocacy/activism that’s fuelled by the results of such studies and
disseminated through all channels (…far more than simply publishing a journal
article),
And
the food industry needs torespond to these signals and
initiatives and get serious about producing food that is affordable, accessible
and healthy.
After a year of
conferences – whether online or otherwise — many of us are weary with the usual
parade of pledges and promises. When there’s little transparency and accountability,
commitments mean very little and again serve to distract and deflect.
We need to see real action…at a scale that matches the problem.
Every now and again a book stops you in your tracks.
Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice by
Rupa Marya and Raj Patel is one such book.
Inflamed brilliantly links globalization with biology
— and everything in between — highlighting the dynamic links between inflamed
bodies, inflamed societies and an inflamed planet. Step by step, going back
into deep history, the authors plot the causal origins of disease and
ill-health “in the multifunctional spaces around and beyond the individual
body – in histories, ecologies, narratives and dynamics of power.”
Inflammation is a process, triggered by the damage or threat
of damage to cells, that mobilises resources to heal injured tissue. In a balanced
system, once the damage has been repaired, inflammation subsides. But if the damage returns, over and over
again, the inflammatory response goes into overdrive and starts to create harm.
The ultimate source of damage is not the pathogen that infects you – the true
source can only be found in deeper and wider systems and processes that render
an individual more likely to be exposed (to the pathogen) and, if exposed, more
likely to fall sick or die as a result. Structural racism, violence, economic
deprivation, pollution, contaminated water and poor diet all combine to generate
chronic inflammation.
The authors remind us that ‘diagnosis’ comes from ‘dia’ (apart)
and ‘gnosis’ (to know). A diagnosis is a story pulled apart. Conventional diagnostic narratives are out of
joint because the story begins in the middle with a symptom. Doctors then go
back in time to try and uncover the immediate causes, before going forwards from
the symptom to prescribe a treatment. But often this doesn’t work because the
story doesn’t go far back enough in time, isn’t deep enough.
The colonial worldview – on which modern medicine is based –
is ahistorical, emphasizing individual health and disconnecting illness from
its social and historical contexts. Modern medicine patches up bodies broken by
the same system that produces the medicine.
A similar thing could be said of the global food system, which we’ll
come to….
As well as being comprehensively researched and written in a
style that pulls you in for hours, Inflamed is an impassioned call for
justice for people who have been, and continue to be, exploited, oppressed and
marginalized.
The COVID pandemic has thrown intergenerational and colonial
injustice into sharp relief. In May 2020, in the UK, nearly all of the medical
staff who had died of COVID-19 were from black, Asian and minority ethnic communities.
Throughout the pandemic, individuals from these communities were at greatest
risk.
Individuals who were hospitalized or died of COVID-19 were a)
more likely to be more infected with SARS-COV-2 in the first place (being dependent
on livelihoods that put their bodies at risk of exposure, without any safety
nets), and b) more likely to fall sick, become hospitalized and die (because
their bodies had suffered chronic inflammation due to poor living conditions, poor
healthcare, unhealthy diets, chronic stress etc).
Marya and Patel use the concept of an ‘exposome’ –
the sum of a lifetime’s exposure to non-genetic drivers of ill-health – to show
how such individuals are far more prone to chronic inflammation and illness
than others.
Colonialism isn’t a thing of the past – it’s happening today
and threatening the lives of the 370 million Indigenous people living in over
seventy countries, while many states continue with their ‘policy of
amnesia’. You may not be one of them, the
authors argue, but you’re affected by them — their ideologies are alive and
well…and they’re making you sick. Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) like heart
disease, lung disease, obesity, depression, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, auto-immune
diseases — are all diseases of colonization – they didn’t exist before.
“Le microbe n’est rien, le terrain est tout”
Eleven years ago, the philosopher, David Abram wrote “the
body is itself a kind of place…a terrain through which things pass, and in
which they sometimes settle and sediment”
One hundred and sixty years ago, Louis Pasteur wrote “the
microbe is nothing, the terrain is everything”
I first came across this amazing quote, in 2000 when
researching HIV, food
and nutrition security. Later, we
brought the concept of enabling (or disabling) environments into the fourth paper
of the Lancet
Nutrition Series (2013) and subsequent papers and blogs
– showing how these environments operate at all levels from the ‘milieu
interieur’ of the human body to food and health environments to social,
political, economic systems. I remember the analogy of an onion with its many layers
from another ground-breaking book ‘Rakku’s Story’ that I read nearly
forty years ago while working in a village in southern India. Like Marya and
Patel – Sheila Zurbrigg locates the causes of the death of a child (Rakku) in multidimensional
spaces and colonial histories.
Each chapter of Inflamed describes a system
(circulatory, respiratory, immune, reproductive, digestive, nervous, endocrine),
as Marya and Patel brilliantly highlight the way they generate inflammation, how
they’re linked to themselves and ultimately to human health.
This book was written by a physician and a political
economist. Its focus is on health but it
is wide-ranging analyses are directly relevant to all of us who work in the
food system. The chapter on the digestive system highlights the importance and
links between diversity of the gut microbiome and soil biodiversity – two
enabling (or disabling) environments. Mediating both are food systems.
Which brings me to the question…
The global health ‘community’ seem to be way ahead of the
food and nutrition ‘community’ when it comes to digging deeper to locate the
drivers of ill-health and malnutrition that originate in wider structures,
systems and colonial histories.
Decolonisation and the commercial and political determinants
of ill-health are being discussed, researched and, in many cases, acted upon.
And yet, the nutrition and food ‘community’ remains relatively silent on these
issues. Some nutrition researchers and activists work on commerciogenic causes
of malnutrition, but relatively few.
Issues of power and equity are similarly neglected. And hardly anyone is working on historical
perspectives, including the influence of structural racism and colonial legacies.
In a few weeks, there’s a major United
Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) in which the multinational food
industry is actively involved — around the ‘table’ where ‘game changing
solutions’ are being discussed and decided. It does not seem to matter that many
of their core businesses are major drivers of malnutrition. These new colonials
are happily engaged in shaping the future in ways which are more amenable to
their interests and objectives. They will continue to ‘talk the talk’ about
healthy diets, as evidence mounts about their failure
to act. The fox is ensconced in the chicken coop and no-one in the UNFSS inner
circle seems to think this is a problem (when was the last time the tobacco
industry showed up at a World Health Assembly?)
UNFSS principles of engagement are cursorily listed but are
weak and do not include the crucial ‘do no harm’ principle. Big multinationals
just hide behind business associations (like WBCSD) who provide cover. Yes,
protests have been aired, open letters signed and many have boycotted the
summit altogether. And yet, summit leaders just carry on, sounding out their mantra
that this is a “people’s summit”. Silence is the main response to criticism –
as if there’s ‘nothing to see here’ and that somehow our normal expectation of
critical engagement and debate among peers is to be suspended this time.
Why is this?
But the bigger question is — why aren’t we, in the food and
nutrition policy community, more actively engaged in the decolonisation debate,
and in research and action/activism around the commercial and power-related drivers
of the problem we’re (supposed to be) focused on?
Echoing Marya and Patel’s call for a ‘deep medicine’
approach, isn’t it about time we engaged in some ‘deep nutrition’?
Stuart Gillespie, 26
August 2021
[‘Inflamed’ is published by Allen Lane and available at
all good non-amazonian bookshops]
The United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) has just wrapped up a three-day pre-summit – a hybrid conference involving participants in Rome and thousands more online.
The goal of the summit is to transform the global food system.
The UNFSS has been heavily criticized for months and many movements, organizations and individuals have boycotted it. A counter mobilization of hundreds of grassroots organizations has emerged. Several multi-signatory open letters and statements have elaborated on its shortcomings – including opaque governance, weak or absent principles of engagement with the private sector, an inability to address (or even acknowledge) conflicts of interest, the sidelining of existing UN institutions, the marginalisation of human rights (this is a United Nations conference remember!) and the silence of UNFSS leaders in the face of this criticism.
In this blog, I focus on one core concern – the Summit’s approach to engaging with multinationals whose products and practices have been shown to drive malnutrition (e.g. Nestle, PepsiCo, Coca Cola).
A few days ago, Carlos Monteiro and colleagues published A Call to the UN Food Systems Summit to reshape global food processing. Carlos is a legend in nutrition, with whom I was lucky to work thirty years ago when he contributed a case study on child stunting in Brazil to a UN Standing Committee on Nutrition initiative: How Nutrition Improves. As the Brazilian malnutrition challenge shifted from under to over, Carlos switched gears. He has since pioneered the NOVA classification and contributed to many studies that have shown how ultra-processed foods (UPFs) generate malnutrition, various non-communicable diseases and premature mortality. Scarcely a week goes by now without more studies emerging highlighting the damage UPFs cause. It’s not only papers — Dr Chris van Tulleken followed his groundbreaking BBC documentary with this podcast on UPFs.
Many of us hoped that the Summit would take the challenge of ultra-processed foods head-on — if not now, then when?
So, what’s happening?
Well, not much. It’s not as if the glass is half-full, or half-empty – the problem is the glass is cracked and the water’s leaking out. We really need a new glass.
Jeff Sachs made this point in this barnstorming speech the other day — “we have a system but we need a different system” – reminding us that we turned food systems over to the private sector a hundred years ago.
Private sector involvement in the Summit is managed by the Private Sector Guiding Group (PSGG) run by World Business Council for Sustainable Development. The WBCSD is an association that prides itself on its open membership – a group that includes tobacco giant Philip Morris among its members. It invited two of these companies – Nestle and PepsiCo to speak the other day in a 50-minute session on “private sector priorities for the UNFSS”. I naively tuned in thinking there would be a discussion of private sector priorities for the UNFSS. There wasn’t. Instead there were 10 presentations by individual companies and organizations on their own priorities. Better to email promotional flyers next time.
Yesterday, WBCSD ran another session in which a speaker from EUFIC suggested that ultra-processing of food was an ambiguous and hotly debated notion. EUFIC count Coca Cola, Cargill and Bunge among their Board members.
Way back in the mists of time, I raised a question in a UNFSS pre-consultation about the involvement of malnutrition-causing behemoths in a global conference aimed at reducing malnutrition. I’ve worked on principles of engagement while at IFPRI (including IFPRI’s own), and I wanted to hear about the Summit’s principles of engagement. I was told that no single company is in a position of influence in steering the UNFSS process and outcomes. On asking why PepsiCo was invited to speak at these consultations, I was blocked on twitter by a UNFSS leader who then accused me of spreading malicious lies (not sure how a question can be a lie, but anyway…). Many other commentators with similar questions have had similar responses.
The fact is that the Summit principles remain as they were at the start. There is no “do no harm” principle. Instead we get vague exhortations to “recognize complexity” and — irony of ironies — to “build trust”.
Looking back, a day after the pre-summit, and two months before the main Summit, the only reasonable conclusion is that the UNFSS is operating under a similar set of engagement principles as the organization who runs its Private Sector Guiding Group (PSGG) – WBCSD — and therefore anyone can join up.
This dovetails with the inclusion rhetoric – that this is a “people’s summit” open to all. Power asymmetries don’t exist in this world — all voices are equal, everyone’s welcome to the party….all we need to do is keep talking to each other.
Over two years ago, Nick Nisbett and I wrote about principles of engagement and the need for clarity on red lines. We were concerned about companies doing “minor goods” with their left hand, while continuing to do “major bads” with their right hand. Minor goods include small-scale boutique corporate social responsibility initiatives and projects. Major bads are the core business practices that generate huge profits from selling junk food and drinks.
Anand Giridharadas wrote about this too here cautioning us to be wary of side salads!
José Graziano da Silva – former FAO Director General and architect of Fome Zero, launched 20 years ago — tweeted his concern yesterday about sugary drinks companies being part of Zero Hunger, Nourish the Future Pledge.
In this session, I asked whether there was a “do no harm” principle for the Pledge. The response (min 33.50) was “yes, there will be”. I guess this means that PepsiCo are not perceived as being harmful to nutrition, or they will be relegated once the principle shows up.
This is not trivial. It opens up a whole new can of worms that could be described as ‘nutri-washing’ – when companies play off one form of malnutrition for another.
Companies whose ultra-processed foods, drinks and marketing practices generate obesogenic environments now have a new ‘get out of jail’ card to play.
They can now gain kudos, profile and acceptability by pledging to fight hunger and undernutrition while continuing to drive overweight and obesity.
Big step backwards.
Of course, there’s a different way. Why not employ clear principles, including “do no harm”, from the start? Why not determine eligibility to pledge by using independent benchmarking and monitoring tools — such as the new FACT transparency index developed by Feed the Truth?
Meanwhile, in all this corporate carousing, the most successful public-private partnership of all time – taxation — has been relatively sidelined. Jeff Sachs again: “To private sector leaders — behave, pay your taxes, follow the rules — that’s what you should do”.
The UNFSS may, or may not, take on board some of these concerns proactively and transparently – there’s still time. But whatever happens the level and type of discourse has changed this year.
In the midst of a pandemic that has highlighted the imperative for transparency, leadership and trust – big issues affecting people and planet, hitherto shrouded or back-burnered, have been surfaced and debated.
At the turn of the year the UN Food Systems Summit leadership had been talking a lot about the need for trust to make progress on food systems. I agreed, and wrote this blog: rebuilding trust in nutrition.
Six months later, in the UNFSS Science Days session today the issue of trust came up again in questions to the panel.
The panel responded as if the issue was a mistrust of science.
I’m not sure why this was side-stepped, but the big issue – and the focus of the questions – related to the science-policy interface. More broadly, it relates to the issue of governance of food systems – present and future – and more immediately, governance of the UNFSS process itself.
IPES-Food recently brought out this briefing note and this podcast was released today. The brief questions the Scientific Group of the UN Food Systems Summit, suggesting it “falls short in several respects: it is nontransparent; is imbalanced in its composition and biased in its perspectives and sources of knowledge; is unreflexive about the relationships between food systems and society; and is pursuing a business-oriented ‘technology and innovation’ agenda.” This led to an open letter “no new science-policy interface for food systems” with multiple signatories.
Then there’s the open letter from the Ad-Hoc Committee on UN Food System Summit (UNFSS) Governance to the UN Secretary General and UNFSS leaders. This letter was written following several meetings, a review of publicly available UNFSS documents, expert input, a crowdsourcing survey and an Independent Dialogue in mid-June.
The conclusion? Though this is a UN summit, the UNFSS decision-making process has yet to implement adequate transparency and accountability principles in line with best practice followed in other UN processes. The crowdsourcing exercise raised issues around conflict of interest, weak principles of engagement and the widespread perception of a lack of trust. Again, multiple signatories.
Many of us who seek to amplify these concerns on social media are either met with silence or we are blocked by UNFSS leadership — as has happened to me twice now.
The UNFSS for months has positioned itself as a ‘people’s summit’. It has prided itself on gazillions of hours of consultation time – and yet so much decision-making remains unexplained and opaque. We don’t know how the hundreds of ‘game-changing solutions’ were whittled down to 50 odd solution clusters, and we don’t know how these clusters map conceptually and operationally to the bigger picture in terms of the summit’s vision and goals. Many have asked to see details of the decisionmaking and selection process and criteria made available online.
Trust is downstream from transparency. To earn it, any public process would need to broadly adhere to the seven (Nolan) principles of selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership.
Earlier this week, Duncan Green published this excellent blog on building and maintaining trust at the interface of policy and research, with this useful chart of 14 trust-building strategies, along with a stepwise process for repairing damaged trust.
Fourteen strategies identified through a case study of ICES for building trust at the interface of environmental science and policy, as published in Cvitanovic et al (2021).
Trust is researchable, and much work has been done on trust theory and its various applications e.g. in natural resource management.
If a lack of trust is seen as such a big challenge, why doesn’t the UNFSS systematically investigate what is needed to build trust and maintain it? Why not commission an independent social network analysis of actors, processes and outcomes?
Why continue to decry the lack of trust – or any major obstacle or constraint – while doing so little to address it?
Over the last year, the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement has been paralleled by an accelerating movement to decolonise development. Among the many papers and blogs, this Lancet Perspectives article is one of the best. Seye Abimbola and Madhu Pai not only highlight the colonialist roots of global health, they go on to envision a decolonised future where equity, justice, humility and respect replace supremacy.
Supremacy goes well beyond ‘pale, male and stale’. It manifests in what does (or does not) happen between countries, and groups and individuals within those countries.
In research, it governs who sets the research question, who pays for the work, who decides on methods, who does the work, whose names are on the paper, who publishes it, who reads it and who decides on the next study to be done – or the next research program to be set up and funded. In a word, everything.
Much of the impetus on decolonisation in recent years has come from global health thinkers and doers like Abimbola and Pai, as the reading list below shows. But of course it transcends any one discipline. Last week, Arvind Subramanian and Devesh Kapur wrote about absent voices in development economics. They cited Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2017 Nobel lecture in which he urged the broadening of “our common literary world to include many more voices from beyond our comfort zones of the elite first-world cultures.”
The decolonisation movement has shone a light on questions of agency, power, human rights, equity and justice in the midst of a pandemic which has also brought these issues to the fore. Not only has COVID-19 exposed different forms of inequity, it has amplified them. People who are poor, marginalized and exploited are more likely to be dependent on fragile livelihoods that cannot be outsourced to Zoom meetings. It has led to the loss of livelihoods and lives.
The word ‘crisis’ comes from the Greek noun ‘krisis’ which means ‘to separate, decide….a turning point’
A year ago, Erica Nelson, Nick Nisbett and I decided to look into this potential ‘turning point’ in the light of past histories of global nutrition. Like global health, global nutrition has roots in colonialism and supremacy. We like to repeat the mantra that nutrition is both a marker (of deprivation) and a maker (of development) but we are far less likely to hark back to a history when nutrition was a discipline that propped up colonialism, racism, inequality and injustice.
Nutrition has always operated at the interface of health and food systems which have deep roots in colonialism. For global nutrition to move forward, it needs to confront its shady past – the overt and disguised racism, the systems of food apartheid and the massive power imbalances within health and food systems. Vaccine nationalism, global food trade terms are just two examples — there are many more.
Credit: Martin Karumwa
Twenty years ago, just after I joined IFPRI, I worked on ‘strengthening capacity for nutrition’. At that time the finger of blame for the failure of large-scale nutrition programs often pointed to insufficient/unsustainable capacities within communities and organizations responsible for implementing them.
But many of us then failed to take the next step. Inadequate capacity is not just the cause of failure, it’s the symptom of a larger failure that has its roots in colonisation and intergenerational injustice. The proper response to capacity gaps or weaknesses is not simply to initiate a capacity development program – it is to dig deeper, to respect, protect and fulfil the human right to food and health, and to work towards intergenerational equity and justice.
A recent article in the New Humanitarian shows how much work remains to be done. The EU’s commissioner for crisis management recently stated: “What is actually the biggest barrier to localisation is the capacity of local actors. Most often, the local organisations lack the capacity to fulfill all the criteria with regard to accountability, transparency, sound financial management…”
Just as ‘community-based’ does not equate with ‘community-driven’, localisation — defined and driven by global northern organisations — is far from decolonisation.
For those of us in the global north, decolonisation requires us to get out of the way – or ‘lean out’. It requires us to become better allies and enablers, not leaders.
The UNFSS promotes itself as a ‘people’s summit’ where everyone is welcome at the table. Current past UN human rights commissioners have written: “Coming to the table to discuss ‘solutions’ is not as simple as it sounds. What if the table is already set, the seating plan non-negotiable, the menu highly limited?” In their Lancet article, Abimbola and Pai also remind us, in a broader context, that “what is on the table is as important as who is around the table.”
In a seminar last week, the UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy, Agnes Kalibata provided assurances that human rights will be foundational to UNFSS processes, and that corporate capture is not an issue.
The big question remains – how will such an open-door policy address the huge power asymmetries between actors that underpin and enable dysfunctional food systems? If human rights are foundational to the Summit process and deliberations, then issues of power, agency and justice must be ‘on the table’ too. As far as I can see, there has been little open public discussion of these issues. Without this, the notion of transformation based on ‘game changers’ is meaningless.
In our brief review of global nutrition histories, we concluded that it is not enough to listen to different perspectives, we have to learn from them, and act differently as a result. To dig deeper, well below the surface to better understand the ‘causes of the causes’ so we’re better able to address them.
And for this to happen, we need humility (not hubris), we need creativity and honesty and — if we are to work together– we need trust.
Here are a few other key readings on decolonisation:
For some reason – unlike our health counterparts — nutrition
professionals tend to shy away from research and action on the commercial
determinants of (mal)nutrition. They don’t
want to be involved in polarizing discussions on the role of the private sector
in nutrition.
A big part of the problem is the way the narrative is
shaped. We constantly hear clichés like
“the private sector should be part of the solution”, or simplistic questions
like “how do we work with the private sector?”.
A good start is probably to ban the phrase “private sector”. It’s just not
helpful. There are many forms of private business, including many small
companies who are trying to improve access and affordability to healthy diets. We
need to do better in differentiating those whose products and practices harm nutrition
from those who (actually or potentially) support good nutrition. The former include the ultra-processed food
and beverage industry which controls much of the global food system. They want
to be loved by the nutrition community, so they target influential individuals,
organizations and conferences and woo them in various ways. Adapted from Big
Tobacco, this corporate playbook has been described and used many times. Being
seen to be part of the nutrition community is huge as it confers tacit approval
of actions – a soft-power ‘get out of jail card’ that reduces the pressure to
change damaging products and practices.
And these tactics clearly work.
The nutrition community has made progress in differentiating
good and bad corporate behaviors and even ranking them. Much of this however draws on statements of
intent, rather than action on the ground.
There are different sets of principles that define good (pro-nutrition) behaviour.
But what’s missing is clarity and consensus on what this looks like in
practice, where the red
lines are, and the implications of crossing them.
This is not trivial.
We currently have a divide between some who believe that it’s perfectly
fine to ‘talk to anyone’ and others (myself included) who believe that actions
need to precede words. The ‘talk-first’ group think they can persuade
malnourishing companies to change their ways – as if they were somehow still not
clear on what to do. The ‘walk-first’
group believe it’s perfectly clear to everyone what’s needed, it just needs to
be done – or at least, there needs to be clear, tangible, independently
verifiable progress first. This needs to be large-scale – it’s just not good
enough to have a few showy small-scale CSR projects dotted around, here and
there. Boutique projects and the media
froth they generate are distractions at best. At worst, they’re dangerous side salads
that confer legitimacy on core business practices that may run in a very
different direction.
Malnutrition is a large-scale problem, it needs large
companies to act at large-scale, in the long term, to be seen to be serious.
This year we have not one but two big talking events – the UN Food Systems Summit (UNFSS)
and the Nutrition
for Growth Summit. The rules for engagement in these summits are not
entirely clear. I have been told there are guidelines but they’re not visible
on the web. There is a Private Sector Guiding Group for the UNFSS but again – it’s
not clear who is in this group, or whether it’s open to anyone.
In the various consultations in different Action Tracks for
the Summit there has been a lot of discussion about the importance of enabling
environments, trust and responsibility. On 23 November, the UN Special Envoy, Agnes
Kalibata stated: “One of
the most broken pieces of our food system is our trust in each other. There
isn`t a high level of trust in the system right now, and that is preventing us
moving forward.”
She’s right — it’s crystal clear that many stakeholders see
trust as a big issue.
The UNFSS has put out a call for game-changing solutions. One
that would go a long way to rebuild trust would be an unequivocal position on
the part of the UNFSS regarding the role of the ultra-processed food industry
in the challenge of addressing malnutrition. In general terms, and specifically
with regard to the Summit process.
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