World Food Day: an opportunity to reflect on corporate influence

In the last two decades, worldwide efforts towards eradicating hunger have achieved the decline of undernourishment by 21.4 percent globally. While such progress must be acknowledged considering the existing and challenging global environment, current approaches to tackling malnutrition are proving to be detrimental to peoples’ human rights. 

The increasing corporate influence on food and nutrition policies has led to a world that combines 795 million people going hungry with half a billion suffering from obesity and related non-communicable diseases. Both obesity and undernutrition are to a major extent caused, inter alia, by the corporate control over food systems, from the production stage to the point where food reaches consumers. Corporations are increasingly presented as the solution to malnutrition and invited to participate in related decision-making processes. And this happens despite them contributing to malnutrition in all its forms, with unethical marketing of insalubrious highly-processed food and breast milk substitutes, grabbing and privatization of natural resources, and labor rights violations, being some of the examples.

As pointed out by FIAN International’s Secretary General Flavio Valente in an opinion article published today, nutrition is being detached from food and the social and cultural context in which food is produced and consumed. Similarly, nutrition is being reduced to the mere measurement of nutrients in food and human bodies. On the occasion of World Food Day, Valente points out that the medicalization of nutrition is an attempt to divert peoples’ health and well-being to something that they must buy. “As a result, malnutrition is being narrowed down to the lack of nutrients that can be rectified with external technical interventions, such as industrialized food supplements, nutrient pills and powders,” he says.

Private sector’s involvement in policy-making is becoming more and more common as a result of so-called “multi-stakeholderism”. The latest developments at this week’s discussions at the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) 42 have led to an increased awareness among civil society over the risks of positioning the CFS as a multi-stakeholder initiative, which is pursued by some societal actors. 

On this note, civil society organizations and social movements recalled the international and intergovernmental nature of the CFS. They also emphasized the principle of inclusiveness that guarantees that each country has one vote – with States having exclusive responsibility for decision-making – to ensure the participation of the most affected by food insecurity and malnutrition, as rights-holders in the process. Furthermore, civil society urged the distinction of roles amongst different societal actors be maintained and not to blur such a distinction under this umbrella of “multi-stakeholderism”. 

Considering States’ human rights obligations, civil society highlighted the importance of States implementing the collectively defined work plan of the CFS. “UN Member States should ensure that effective safeguards against potential conflicts of interest are put in place to protect the CFS against undue corporate influence;” Flavio Valente concludes.

For media enquiries, please contact delrey[at]fian.org and bley-folly[at]fian.org

Read the findings of the newly released Right to Food and Nutrition Watch

Read the guest column of Flavio Valente “Food and nutrition: not for sale” on Devex.

NOTES TO EDITORS:

Understanding that data is not enough to show current realities, these are recent estimates by the World Health Organization (Global Health Observatory) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2011-2015 editions):

• Some 795 million people in the world do not have enough food to lead a healthy active life. That’s about one in nine people on earth.

• Poor nutrition causes nearly half (45%) of deaths in children under five – 3.1 million children each year.

• Worldwide obesity has more than doubled since 1980. In 2014, more than 1.9 billion adults, 18 years and older, were overweight. Of these over 600 million were obese.

• 2 billion people suffer from one or more micronutrient deficiencies and 1.4 billion people are overweight.