Search results: food policy action

I’m getting caught up on reports this week.  Here’s one from the US Agency for International Development:  COVID-19 and Nutrition Analytical Framework

The purpose of the Framework:

• Allow policymakers and implementers to better track the interaction of the COVID-19 pandemic and nutrition
• Provide a tool for planning policies, programs, and interventions
• Help identify data gaps
• Support a systems approach to addressing problems “caused, increased, or intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic”

The Framework:

What I like about this Framework is how it so clearly identifies the upstream system levels of intervention: food, health, social, education, and infrastructure.

It’s also interactive, but for that you have to go to its source and click on each section.

The UK government has just published its long-awaited food strategy to almost universal disappointment.

But first, some background. Nearly a year ago, I wrote about the UK’s strategy proposals.  These had been commissioned from Henry Dimbleby, a restaurateur with a deep interest in food policy (the British version of Jose Andres?).

To summarize what I said in July 2021.

Henry Dimbleby described the UK’s National Food Strategy as  a “bit of a labour of love.”  It came a slide deck of 175 items.

A separate document. summarizes the report’s 14 recommendations.  Most of the recommendations dealt with school feeding and feeding programs for the poor.  Others:

Recommendation 1. Introduce a sugar and salt reformulation tax.  This came with a separate report on the impact of such a tax; it recommended using revenues to help get fresh fruit and vegetables to low income families.

Recommendation 11. Invest £1 billion in innovation to create a better food system.

Recommendation 13. Strengthen government procurement rules to ensure that taxpayer money is spent on healthy and sustainable food.

So, does the strategy do any of these things?  I have to confess finding the report unreadable.  It is extremely wordy and imprecise, talks a lot about objectives, but says almost nothing specific.  Here is just one example:

The strategy comes at a time of significant increases in food prices, largely because of energy prices and exacerbated by events in Ukraine, which is very challenging for people across the country. We are engaging closely with the food industry to understand price impacts and any mitigating measures, including through our Food Industry Resilience Forum and UK Agricultural Market Monitoring Group. We are also working closely with third sector organisations to understand challenges related to food access.

One section gives action items (I have edited these for clarity):

• Keep producing domestic food at current levels
• Promote job training for the agri-food industry.
• Reduce childhood obesity by half by 2030; reduce diet-related disease; increase healthier food
• Reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and the environmental impacts of the food system
• Export £1 trillion of food annually by 2030
• Maintain high standards for food consumed in the UK

How?  It doesn’t really say.  The one action item I could locate is to create a Food Data Transparency Partnership.

The partnership will champion consumer interests, providing people with the information they need to make more sustainable, ethical, and healthier food choices, and incentivise industry to produce healthier and more ethical and sustainable food….This partnership will join up with existing work across government to promote healthier food choices, so that government can speak with one voice to industry. It will also support further measures to strengthen incentives to reformulate food, promote healthier food and turn the trend on the overconsumption of calories to tackle obesity.

Unsurprisingly, reactions have been fierce: not a strategy, disappointing, nothing concrete about obesity , health, or reducing meat as a means to address climate change.  If those things are there, I couldn’t find them.

I also couldn’t find The Guardian’s most amusing criticism of the report:

Among its few policy proposals are the suggestion there could be more fish farming, which is environmentally controversial, and an increase in the use of “responsibly sourced wild venison”.

Is that in the report?  I can’t find any reference to venison or deer, however sourced.

Other critiques in The Guardian are here and here.

This is a lost opportunity, and a big one.  Disappointing, indeed.

Saru Jayaraman has a new book out:

She explains what this is about in an email:

As described in this recent NY Times article, we have been documenting thousands of restaurants raising wages to a median of $13.50 plus tips nationwide in order to recruit staff. As a result, we are so close to passing One Fair Wage – a very hopeful, silver lining to emerge from several challenging years.

In this moment of incredible change, we are hoping to use my new book – One Fair Wage: Ending Subminimum Pay in America (New Press, 2021) – to call for policy that will make the increasing wages nationwide permanent.

Please join us for one of the in-person or virtual events.

The newsletter issued by Hunter College’s Food Policy Center (subscribe to it here) notes recent items about food workers, restaurants, and food labor:

• A Record 4.3 Million Workers Quit Their Jobs in August, Led by Food and Retail Industries (CNBC) 
• Restaurant Wages Tick Higher but the Industry’s Labor Crunch Remains Intractable (CNBC)  
• ‘Death of 1,000 Cuts’: Kellogg’s Workers on Why They’re Striking (The Guardian)  
• Labor Strikes Target Big Food as Workers Seize on Industry Turmoil (Food Dive)  
• Restaurant Criticism Was Evolving Well Before COVID-19 (The Counter)  
• Food-Delivery Platforms Now Serving Ads (The Wall Street Journal)  
• 22 Organizations Supporting Mental Health Along the Food Chain (Food Tank)

Comment: Now more than ever, labor issues matter.  It helps to stay informed about what’s happening on the food-labor front.

Reading about Afghanistan sent me back to what I wrote about food aid to that country in my book, Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety (University of California Press, 2003, revised edition 2010: pages 260-265).  The World Food Programme has declared a hunger emergency  in Afghanistan that affects a third of the population, 14 million people.  This excerpt from my book illustrates a small part of the history of the current Afghanistan tragedies.

A New Emphasis for Food Security: Safety from Bioterrorism 

On October 13, 2001, New York Times photographer James Hill took this photograph of U.S. “Humanitarian Daily Rations” dropped over Afghanistan.  The photograph appeared in the Week in Review section on October 21.  Mr. Hill said the food packets were available in local markets for the equivalent of 60 cents each (Photographer’s Journal: War is a Way of Life, November 19, 2001)…©2001 New York Times Photo Archive.  Used with permission.)

Prior to the terrorist attacks [of September 2001], food security in the United States had a relatively narrow meaning that derived from the need to establish criteria for welfare and food assistance.  In the 1980s, the U.S. government expanded its definition of “hunger” (as a problem requiring food subsidies or donations) to include involuntary lack of access to food—the risk of hunger as well as the physical experience.   By this definition, food security came to mean reliable access to adequate food.[1]

The international definition is broader, however.  In 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which said, “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and the necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.”[2]  Many interpret this provision to mean that people have a right to food security, in this case encompassing five elements: (1) reliable access to food that is not only (2) adequate in quantity and quality but also (3) readily available, (4) culturally acceptable, and (5) safe.  With respect to safety, the Geneva Convention of August 1949, an international agreement on the protection of civilians during armed conflict, expressly prohibited deliberate destruction or pollution of agriculture or of supplies of food and water.  These broader meanings derived from work in international development, where it was necessary to distinguish the physical sensation of hunger (which can be temporary or voluntary), from the chronic, involuntary lack of food that results from economic inequities, resource constraints, or political disruption.[3]

The significance of the lack-of-access meaning of food security is evident from a health survey conducted in a remote region of Afghanistan just a few months prior to the September 2001 attacks.  Not least because of decades of civil strife, Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world, and its health indices are dismal: a life expectancy of 46 years (as compared to 77 years in the United States) and an infant mortality rate of 165 per 1,000 live births (as compared to 7).[4]   At the time of the survey, the United Nations World Food Programme estimated that 3.8 million people in Afghanistan lacked food security and therefore required food aid.   Investigators examined the health consequences of this lack and found poor nutritional status to be rampant in the population and a contributing factor in nearly all of the deaths that occurred during the survey period.  Half of the children showed signs of stunted growth as a result of chronic malnutrition.  Scurvy (the disease resulting from severe vitamin C deficiency) alone accounted for 7% of deaths among children and adults.  Because visible nutrient deficiency diseases like scurvy are late indicators of malnutrition, the investigators viewed the level of food insecurity as a humanitarian crisis—less serious than in parts of Africa, but worse than in Kosovo during its 1999 upheavals.[5]  After October 2001, when bombing raids led to further displacement of the population, the United Nations increased its estimate of the size of the food insecure population to 6 million and predicted that the number would grow even larger as humanitarian aid became more difficult to deliver.

In part to alleviate shortages caused by the bombings, resulting dislocations, and the collapse of civic order, the United States began a program of food relief through airdrops.  The packages, labeled “Food gifts from the people of the United States of America,” contained freeze-dried lentil soup, beef stew, peanut butter, jelly, crackers, some spices, and a set of plastic utensils, and provided one day’s food ration for an adult–about 2,200 calories.  Beginning in October 2001, airplanes dropped about 35,000 food packages a day.  The quantities alone suggested that their purpose had more to do with politics than food security.[6]  A British commentator did the calorie counts:

If you believe, as some commentators do, that this is an impressive or even meaningful operation, I urge you to conduct a simple calculation.  The United Nations estimates that there are 7.5 [million] hungry people in Afghanistan.  If every ration pack reached a starving person, then one two hundredth of the vulnerable were fed by the humanitarian effort on Sunday.…But the purpose of the food drops is not to feed the starving but to tell them they are being fed.  President Bush explained on Sunday that by means of these packages, “the oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America and our allies.”[7]

Even with a possible exaggeration of the extent of food insecurity, this comment suggests that food aid is a complicated business, and at best a temporary expedient.   One problem is getting dropped food to the people who need it most. The Figure illustrates the fate of some of the food aid packages.  As often happens, enterprising people collect the packages and sell them on the open market; this gets the food into public circulation, but at a price.   In this instance, the packages also encountered unexpected safety hazards.  The Pentagon warned that the Taliban might try to poison the packages or spread rumors of poisoning as a means of propaganda against the United States, but Taliban leaders denied this accusation: “No one can be that brutal and ignorant as to poison his own people.”[8]  The packages themselves presented hazards.  They were packed in specially designed plywood containers that could be dropped from 30,000 feet without breaking, but several landed in the wrong place and destroyed people’s homes.  Children sent to collect the food packages died or lost limbs when they ran across fields planted with land mines.  While the food drop was in progress, the political situation made it impossible for food aid to get into the country through conventional routes.  Later, warlords stole shipments, and riots broke out when supplies ran out.[9]  Political stability depends on food security, and food security is inextricably linked to political stability.  Without such stability, food aid alleviates a small part of the humanitarian crisis—better than nothing, but never a long-term solution.[10]

Would increasing the amount of food aid alleviate the crisis?   Former Senator George McGovern, U.S. ambassador to the World Food Programme said, “If these people have nourishment for healthy lives, this is less fertile territory for cultivation by terrorist leaders.”  Bringing in another issue germane to this book, he said that the war on hunger in Afghanistan and elsewhere cannot be waged without biotechnology: “It is probably true that affluent countries can afford to reject scientific agriculture and pay more for food produced by so-called natural methods.  But the 800 million poor, chronically hungry people of Asia, Africa and Latin America cannot afford such foods.”[11]  As we have seen, biotechnology is still a remote solution to food security problems, and it is difficult to imagine how it might alleviate immediate food shortages in Afghanistan.

References

[1]   Andrews MS, Prell MA, eds.  Second Food Security Measurement and Research Conference, Volume II: Papers.  USDA/ERS, July 2001.

[2]   United Nations.  Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Adopted by the U.N. General Assembly, December 10, 1948).  Reprinted in JAMA 1998;280:469–470.

[3]   Oshaug A, Eide WB, Eide A.  Human rights: a normative basis for food and nutrition-relevant policies.  Food Policy 1994;19:491–516.  Drèze J, Sen A.  Hunger and Public Action.  Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.

[4]   The World Factbook–United States, 2001. Central Intelligence Agency. Online: www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html.

[5]   Assefa F, Jabarkhil MZ, Salama P, et al.  Malnutrition and mortality in Kohistan district, Afghanistan, April 2001.  JAMA 2001;286:2723–2728.  Ahmad K.  Scurvy outbreak in Afghanistan prompts food aid concerns.  Lancet 2002;359:1044.

[6]   Perlez J.  Individual meals from the sky.  NYT, October 8, 2001:B3.

[7]   Monbiot G.  Folly of aid and bombs. Guardian (London), October 9, 2001.  Online: www.guardian.co.uk.

[8]   Hungry for peace: with winter near, starving Afghans need more than air-dropped relief.  San Francisco Chronicle, October 26, 2001:A1,A18.  Shanker T, Schmitt E.  U.S. warns Afghans that Taliban may poison relief food.  NYT, October 25, 2001:B2

[9]  Dao J.  Sergeant designs a better box for dropping food to Afghans.  NYT, October 10, 2001:B3.  Waldman A.  Food drops go awry, damaging several homes.  NYT, November 21, 2001:B2.  Becker E.  Even with roads still open, security fears are choking the flow of food aid.  NYT, November 30, 2001:B4.  Chivers CJ, Becker E.  Aid groups say warlords steal as needy wait.  NYT, January 4, 2002:A1,A15.

[10]  Nestle M, Dalton S.  Food aid and international hunger crises: the United States in Somalia.  Agriculture and Human Values 1994;11(4):19–27.  Lewis P.  Downside of doing good: disaster relief can harm.  NYT, February 27, 1999:B9.  McKinlay D.  Refugees left in the cold at “slaughterhouse” camp. Guardian (London), January 3, 2002.  Gall C.  Pleas for food, help and a way out.  NYT, January 20, 2002:A15.

[11]   Truelsen S.  Food aid and the war on terrorism.  The Voice of Agriculture.  American Farm Bureau Federation, November 5, 2001. Online: Online:  www.fb.com. 

I am a co-author on a paper published recently by BMJ Global Health 2021;6:e006885.  The need to reshape global food processing: a call to the United Nations Food Systems Summit.  Authors: Carlos Augusto Monteiro, Mark Lawrence, Christopher Millett, Marion Nestle, Barry M Popkin, Gyorgy Scrinis, Boyd Swinburn.

Because this paper is open access, I reproduce its text below.  The link is to the pdf.

Thanks to Tom Forster at the New School for sending information about the programs—formal, informal, and counter.  The formal and informal events are in Rome, but available online.  Registration is essential.

For information and registration:

Formal programme: this has the schedule for the 150 sessions.    Register for them here.

Informal programme: register at the links given.

Counter Summit events: these are listed online, along with a call to action.

The Counter events are being organized by the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism for Relations with the UN Committee on World Food Security (CSM).

The CSM has produced the following resources:

• What is wrong about the UN Food Systems Summit
• Briefing for UN Member States outlining CSM’s main concerns
• Call-to-action for the Counter-Mobilizations to Tranform Corporate Food Systems
• More information about CSM’s position vis-à-vis the UN Food Systems Summit

Yesterday’s post was about the UK’s efforts to restrict the marketing of junk foods to children.  This is part of a larger effort to establish a rational framework for improving the entire food system.

In 2020, the government published Part One of the Food Strategy Report it had commissioned from Henry Dimbleby.  The report comes with a 3-minute film explaining what it is about.

The Part One report announced a forthcoming Part Two to evaluate the current system and set recommendations, and explained its philosophical basis:

Should nanny tell us what to eat?

The already complex job of working out how to help different people in different circumstances is complicated by one of the fundamental questions of political philosophy: what role should the state play in the private lives of its citizens? Libertarians and public health campaigners have fought a running battle for years over this question. But when it comes to diet, even fierce opponents of the “nanny state” now recognize that the problem is serious enough to warrant greater state intervention….The vast majority of those we spoke to (and almost every parent) said they were fed up with being bombarded by junk food marketing and thought the state should intervene.

Henry Dimbleby’s Part Two report is now out (he described it to me in an e-mail as a “bit of a labour of love”).  Here it is: The UK’s National Food Strategy

His report is based on evidence summarized in a slide deck of 175 items.

The report’s 14 recommendations are summarized, with rationale and references, in a separate document.  Most of the recommendations deal with school feeding and and feeding programs for the poor.  Some are likely to get focused attention:

• Recommendation 1. Introduce a sugar and salt reformulation tax. Use some of the revenue to help get fresh fruit and vegetables to low income families.
• Recommendation 11. Invest £1 billion in innovation to create a better food system.
• Recommendation 13. Strengthen government procurement rules to ensure that taxpayer money is spent on healthy and sustainable food.

The first recommendation comes with its own, separate report on the impact of a tax on added sugar and salt.

The responses:

From The Guardian

The government-commissioned National Food Strategy, drawn up by the restaurateur Henry Dimbleby, says the UK population’s “malfunctioning” appetites and poor diets – fuelled by consumer and manufacturer’s reliance on processed food – place an unsustainable burden on the NHS and contribute to 64,000 deaths each year.

Its most eye-catching recommendation is a levy of £3 a kilo on sugar and £6 a kilo on salt sold wholesale for use in processed food, restaurants and catering, which it says would be a world first. This would raise up to £3.4bn a year, some of which should fund an expansion of free schools meals to an extra 1.1 million children and an overhaul of itain’s food and cooking culture… Dimbleby believes the tax would incentivise manufacturers to reduce salt and sugar levels by reformulating products.

From FoodNavigator.com: From taxing salt and sugar to reducing animal proteins: The controversial proposals in the UK’s National Food Strategy paper.  In 2019 the UK government commissioned a review of the country’s food system. Today, the results are in – and the far-reaching paper includes some controversial recommendations…. Read more  [note: This has a good summary of the 14 recommendations].

From FoodManufacture.com

• National Food Strategy Part 2: sugar and salt tax plans: The National Food Strategy Part 2 has been published, revealing proposals for a sugar and salt tax on all processed products, except ingredients for home cooking, and on foods sold through foodservice channels…. Read more
• National Food Strategy Part 2: reactions: The National Food Strategy Part 2 has provoked mixed reactions, with big grocery retailers backing calls for mandatory reporting of key information, while others have criticised sugar and salt tax proposals…. Read more

And for a broad look at what’s happening in UK food policy, see: Testing Times for UK Food Policy: Nine principles and Tests, by Tim Lang, Erik Millstone, Terry Marsden.  This deals with holding governments accountable.

The Discussion Paper examines the state of post-EU UK food security and policy. It applies a multi-criteria approach, seeing food not as a matter that can be reduced to one overarching goal – cheapness, say, or supermarket availability – but as an issue on which public policy has to weigh up and include several equally worthy and evidence-based concerns. The report offers an approach to ensuring UK food security in the years ahead. It offers nine public-interest Principles which should guide future food policy. These propose that it is possible to capture a consensus on the need for change and what it entails. Each Principle leads to a Test that the UK public and policy-makers could apply to any policy proposals for the food system that emanate from Government in coming months.

Tim Lang’s book, Feeding Britain, is essential reading to understand what’s happening—and not happening—in the UK.

The UK government is thinking and acting on food policy issues.  If only ours did too.

Yesterday, I posted information about the forthcoming UN Summit on Food Systems (UNFSS) and its Pre-Summit.  The Summit has been heavily criticized on the grounds that it:

• Sets agenda themes determined by corporate entities such as The World Economic Forum and the Gates Foundation.
• Favors corporate technological solutions to food system problems.
• Ignores agroecology, organic farming, and indigenous knowledge.
• Excludes meaningful representation from people most affected by food system transformation.
• Promotes corporate control of food systems.
• Ignores the conflicted interests of its organizers.
• Is fundamentally undemocratic.

These criticisms are so severe that The Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism for Relations with the UN (CSM) is organizing counter events July 25 to July 27.

• Download and share this call to action
• Learn more about CSM’s position as regards the UN Food Systems Summit

Much has been written to document such concerns.

Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples Mechanism, North America: UN Food System Summit “Dialogue” events spark renewed concerns of corporate capture in North American food system and rural economies globally

In March 2020, 550 civil society organizations sent an open letter to the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General condemning the involvement of the World Economic Forum in the UNFSS, the appointment of Ms. Agnes Kalibata as UNFSS Special Envoy due to her links to corporate agribusiness, the failure of the UNFSS to elevate the primacy and indivisibility of human rights frameworks as foundational to the governance of food systems, and the necessity of civil society organizations to have an autonomous, self-organized, and equal ‘seat at the table.’ These concerns have not been addressed despite numerous CSM interactions with UNFSS organizers.

The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES): An IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] for Food?”  How the UN Food Systems Summit is being used to advance a problematic new science-policy agenda.

Behind what sounds like a technocratic question is in fact a high-stakes battle over different visions of what constitutes legitimate science and relevant knowledge for food systems. This, in turn, is part of a broader battle over what food systems should look like and who should govern them.

Matthew Canfield, Molly D. Anderson and Philip McMichael.  UN Food Systems Summit 2021: Dismantling Democracy and Resetting Corporate Control of Food Systems.  Front. Sustain. Food Syst., 13 April 2021. [Note: this paper has an especially useful historical account of attempts to establish global food system governance]

Although few people will dispute that global food systems need transformation, it has become clear that the Summit is instead an effort by a powerful alliance of multinational corporations, philanthropies, and export-oriented countries to subvert multilateral institutions of food governance and capture the global narrative of “food systems transformation”…It elaborates how the current structure and forms of participant recruitment and public engagement lack basic transparency and accountability, fail to address significant conflicts of interest, and ignore human rights.

Independent scientists:  Open letter to policy makers: No new science-policy interface for food systems.

We call on governments and policymakers to…Support participatory processes that actively and meaningfully include plural perspectives and voices in food system governance. Farmers and other citizens need inclusive, participatory, and safe spaces within the CFS-HLPE process to co-create the knowledge necessary to govern food systems at global, national and local levels.

Maywa Montenegro, Matthew Canfield, and Alastair Iles.  Weaponizing Science in Global Food Policy.

Nobody disputes the need for urgent action to transform the food system. But the UNFSS has been criticized by human rights experts for its top-down and non-transparent organization. Indigenous peoples, peasants, and civil society groups around the world know their hard-won rights are under attack. Many are protesting the summit’s legitimacy and organizing counter-mobilizations.

Scientists are also contesting a summit because of its selective embrace of science, as seen in a boycott letter signed by nearly 300 academics, from Brazil to Italy to Japan.

Through the Summit, “science” has been weaponized by powerful actors not only to promote a technology-driven approach to food systems, but also to fragment global food security governance and create institutions more amenable to the demands of agribusiness.

Scientists: An open letter from scientists calling for a boycott of the 2021 Food Systems Summit.

Some critics of the UNFSS have suggested ways that the process could become less problematic: (1) it could incorporate a human rights framing into all of its “action tracks”; (2) it could create an action track led by the CSM on the corporate capture of food systems; and (3) it could designate the UN Committee on World Food Security as the institutional home to implement recommendations coming out of the summit.

Nisbett N, et al.  Equity and expertise in the UN Food Systems Summit.  BMJ Global Health. 2021;6:e006569.

…time is not late to take action in rebalancing powers and enabling a greater diversity of knowledge, not simply among a multiplicity of voices in multiple public forums, but explicitly engaged at the summit’s top table of expertise and summit leadership. It is also not late to adopt mechanisms that limit the engagement of those actors whose primary interests have driven our food systems to
become unhealthy, unsustainable and inequitable, so the voices of the people can be clearly heard..

An alternative: The Global People’s Summit on Food Systems

The People’s Summit is composed primarily of movements of landless peasants, agricultural workers, fisherfolk, indigenous people, rural women, and youth—or small food producers who produce 70% of the world’s food, yet remain among the world’s poorest and food insecure.  “The issue of landlessness and land grabbing is not on the agenda of the UNFSS.  Nowhere in its so-called Action Tracks do discussions highlight critical trends such as on land concentration and reconcentration in the hands of big agribusiness firms and their network of local landlords and compradors, nor on the massive displacement of rural communities to give way to big private investments and large development projects,” said Chennaiah Poguri, chairperson of the Asian Peasant Coalition (APC).

Additions

• Video explaining “multistakeholderism”
• Links (ongoing) to papers on the UN Food System Summit