Food and nutrition: not for sale

Over the coming year, around 795 million people will continue to face hunger, or “undernourishment,” using medical parlance. A further 2 billion will remain malnourished due to imbalanced diets — another form of hunger, mostly affecting children and women of reproductive age.

Paradoxically, while this happens, more than half a billion will be suffering from obesity and associated noncommunicable diseases, such as diabetes and cancer, and risking preventable early death. I don’t like to consider the cup — perhaps plate would be more appropriate — as half empty, but World Food Day hardly seems like a day for celebrations.
All these “numbers” have names and faces. Their suffering and deaths are predictable — most are indeed preventable — and are as unacceptable as the drowning of the two-year old refugee child Aylan. Such predicaments are not natural or accidental, but the result of misguided policies, actions and omissions by public authorities, from the local council to the global community. And that includes the failure to effectively regulate the activities of transnational corporations.

Since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, business rhetoric has increasingly spilled over into the international political arena, namely the United Nations. Corporations have been positioning themselves as part of the solution to global challenges, such as climate change and eco-destruction, poverty and hunger.

In 2000, the U.N. Global Compact was created with the alleged purpose of stimulating TNCs to implement policies aligned with respecting human rights, environment and anti-corruption. A means to avoid binding regulations and replace these with voluntary initiatives, the Global Compact not only served to “bluewash” corporations but in fact handed them the keys and opened the door to the U.N.

Later in 2010, the World Economic Forum launched the Global Redesign Initiative. This spells out its vision for the restructuring of global governance, in particular the U.N., into a “multi-stakeholder” platform, in which corporations govern alongside states and select civil society organizations — a vision that is already kicking in under the watchful eye of big business.
And with the growing weight of the private sector on public policymaking, high priorities of TNCs have infiltrated crucial areas such as food and nutrition. Big food industry and agribusiness already, and heavily, influence this policy arena, including the type of solutions that should be sought to tackle malnutrition.

Examples of the above are initiatives such as Scaling Up Nutrition and Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition. Although different in nature, both confine nutrition to the interaction between food and the human body, the technical and medical domains, thereby minimizing the socio-economic and cultural context in which human beings feed themselves. The danger of this approach is that the understanding of malnutrition is reduced to “the lack of nutrients” that can only be rectified with external technical interventions. These mostly involve industrialized food supplements, nutrient pills and powders — that not so coincidentally also imply large-scale profit.

As echoed by the Right to Food and Nutrition WATCH 2015, behind policy responses there are increasingly programs that are heavily influenced — and in some cases technically run — by the corporate sector. This progressively rules out bottom-up approaches based on the promotion of locally produced, diversified and culturally acceptable diets, which have proved their suitability to communities from every angle.

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This article was first published by Devex on the ocassion of World Food Day