Currently browsing posts about: FAO

The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is taking the lead on bringing dietary guidelines into the 21st Century.

It is calling for national dietary guidelines not only to be nutrient-based and food-based, but food systems-based.

Food systems-based guidelines extend beyond food-based guidelines that “provide advice on foods, food groups and dietary patterns to provide the required nutrients to the general public to promote overall health and prevent chronic diseases.”

Food system-based guidelines not only address health and nutritional priorities but also consider sociocultural, economic, and environmental sustainability factors.  This means

context-specific multilevel recommendations that enable governments to outline what constitutes a healthy diet from sustainable food systems, align food-related policies and programmes and support the population to adopt healthier and more sustainable dietary patterns and practices that favour, among other outcomes, environmental sustainability and socio-economic equity.

This is a huge advance.  It means that sustainability issues are essential components of dietary advice.

From now on, dietary guidelines that do not consider sustainability are out of date.

Note: By order of Congress, the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines did not consider sustainability in its meat recommendations and sustainability was off the table for the 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines and also for the 2025-2030 version now underway.  This means the new guidelines issues in 2025 will be dated and largely irrelevant to the modern era.

Unless the Advisory Committee gets to work.  I hope it does.

I received an e-mailed news release from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) about its latest report.

The press release headline: Hidden costs of global agrifood systems worth at least $10 trillion.  154-country study makes case for true cost accounting to guide policy.

Our current agrifood systems impose huge hidden costs on our health, the environment and society, equivalent to at least $10 trillion a year, according to a ground-breaking analysis by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), covering 154 countries. This represents almost 10 percent of global GDP.

According to the 2023 edition of The State of Food and Agriculture (SOFA), the biggest hidden costs (more than 70 percent) are driven by unhealthy diets, high in ultra-processed foods, fats and sugars, leading to obesity and non-communicable diseases, and causing labour productivity losses. Such losses are particularly high in high- and upper-middle-income countries.

This report, FAO says, presents initial cost estimates.  A report next year will focus on ways to mitigate these costs.  Governments, it says, “can pull different levers to adjust agrifood systems and drive better outcomes overall. Taxes, subsidies, legislation and regulation are among them.”

The FAO director says: “the future of our agrifood systems hinges on our willingness to appreciate all food producers, big or small, to acknowledge these true costs, and understand how we all contribute to them, and what actions we need to take. ”

The report urges governments to use true cost accounting to address the climate crisis, poverty, inequality and food security.

True cost accounting (TCA), according to the report is:

A holistic and systemic approach to measuring and valuing the environmental, social, health and economic costs and benefits generated by agrifood systems to facilitate improved decisions by policymakers, businesses, farmers, investors and consumers.43

Translated, this means trying to assign numbers to the externalized and hidden costs of food production and consumption, meaning not just what you pay at the cash register but also the costs you pay in other ways for health care, animal welfare, biodiversity, polluted water and soil, and climate change.

These, says this report, add up to about $12.7 trillion a year.

The idea is to get food producers to pay their fair share of these costs—issues of accounting and accountability (according to the Scientific Group of the UN Food Systems Summit). 

The report comes with a big collection of resources:

• Read the full digital report
• Read the In Brief
• Read the Interactive story: Beyond the price tag
• Watch the Video: State of Food and Agriculture 2023. Revealing the true cost of food to transform agrifood systems
• Read the press release: Hidden costs of global agrifood systems worth at least $10 trillion

Read the background papers:

• Hidden costs of agrifood systems and recent trends from 2016 to 2023
• Revealing the hidden costs of agrifood systems to enhance their value
• Accounting for the hidden costs of agrifood systems in data-scarce contexts
• The role of true cost accounting in guiding agrifood businesses and investments towards sustainability
• True cost accounting applications for agrifood systems policymakers

That should be plenty to keep us all busy for quite a while.  Enjoy and ponder.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. released its annual State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report last week.  Its conclusions are sobering.

Global hunger is still far above pre-pandemic levels. It is estimated that between 690 and 783 million people in the world faced hunger in 2022. This is 122 million more people than before the COVID-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, the increase in global hunger observed in the last two years has stalled and, in 2022, there were about 3.8 million fewer people suffering from hunger than in 2021. The economic recovery from the pandemic has contributed to this, but there is no doubt that the modest progress has been undermined by rising food and energy prices magnified by the war inUkraine. There is no room for complacency, though, as hunger is still on the rise throughout Africa, Western Asia and the Caribbean.

Ultra-processed foods are a critical part of this story.  The word “processed” comes up 264 times in this report; “highly processed” comes up 99 times .  Some examples:

• Healthy diets are essential for achieving food security goals and improving nutritional outcomes. A healthy diet…is based on a wide range of unprocessed or minimally processed foods, balanced across food groups, while it restricts the consumption of highly processed foods and drink products…Eating a healthy diet throughout the life cycle is critical for preventing all forms of malnutrition, including child stunting and wasting, micronutrient deficiencies and overweight or obesity. It also helps reduce the risk of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and certain types of cancer.
• The unfinished agendas to reduce stunting, wasting and micronutrient deficiency, along with rising overweight and obesity, represent the current challenge to address multiple forms of malnutrition. Malnutrition in all its forms is related to poor diets, the rise of low-cost
  nutrient-poor foods and the increasing availability of highly processed foods in rural areas.
• Supply-side factors, including globalized technology in food production, transportation and marketing, coupled with an increase in demand for readily available foods, have contributed to a substantial expansion of supermarkets, hypermarkets, food deliveries and other convenience retailers. However, these are also associated with increased supply and spread of energy-dense and highly processed foods.
• However, urbanization has also contributed to the spread and consumption of processed and highly processed foods, which are increasingly cheap, readily available and marketed, with private sector small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and larger companies often setting the nutrition landscape. Cost comparisons of individual food items and/or food groups from existing studies indicate that the cost of nutritious foods – such as fruits, vegetables and animal source foods – is typically higher than the cost of energy-dense foods high in fats, sugars and/or salt, and of staple foods, oils and sugars.
• The dynamics of supply and demand for processed foods, however, are complex. There has been a surge on the supply side, with small and medium enterprises and large private companies alike making massive aggregate investments in all types of processed foods (from minimally to highly processed) in response to demand. At the same time, aggressive marketing and relatively low pricing – and even interference in policies to curb consumption of highly processed foods and sugar-sweetened beverages – are driving up consumption.

The report emphasizes the importance of food processing in contributing to poor diets and health.

What is to be done?  From the Brief summary:

Leveraging connectivity across the rural–urban continuum will require adequate governance mechanisms and institutions to coordinate coherent investment beyond sectoral and administrative boundaries. To this end, subnational governments can play a key role in designing and implementing policies beyond the traditional top-down approach. Approaches to agrifood systems governance should ensure policy coherence among local, regional and national settings through the engagement of relevant agrifood systems stakeholders at all levels.

I read this as saying what’s need is community-based, bottom up approaches at the local level.  That’s a great place to start.  Go for it.

Resources

• The online report
• The  pdf
• The digital report
• The Brief 
• And see Access to food in 2022: filling data gaps. Results of twenty national surveys using the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES)

I saw this headline in The Guardian.

I went immediately to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report:  A multi-billion-dollar opportunity – Repurposing agricultural support to transform food systems.

The trends emerging from the analysis are a clear call for action at country, regional and global levels to phase out the most distortive, environmentally and socially harmful support, such as price incentives and coupled subsidies, and redirecting it towards investments in public goods and services for agriculture, such as research and development and infrastructure, as well as decoupled fiscal subsidies.

The report detail the harmful effects of current agricultural subsidy practices in promoting crops that are harmful to human health and to the environment.

Most support worldwide, through price incentives, has been given to commodities with high GHG emissions such as beef, milk and rice, which have the largest carbon footprint.

In the US, the distribution of agricultural subsidies looks like this:

The main effect of subsidies is to cause farmers to plant more of whatever gets subsidized.  One result is that corn, a water-intensive crop, is grown in places where water is scarce.

Farm income reached record levels in 2020, but one-third of farm income came from government payments (nearly $46 billion in total), largely because of increases during the pandemic.

FAO’s Recommendations

• Phase out the most distorting and environmentally and socially harmful policies, such as price incentives or coupled subsidies.
• Repurpose support for high-emission or unhealthy products towards support that has environmental and health conditionalities and that promotes more sustainable food systems.
• Repurpose fiscal support to protect consumers and ensure food security and nutrition, especially for the poorest.
• Create fiscal space for agricultural support by tapping into new fiscal resources aimed at addressing climate change or stimulating the economy.

Good ideas, but good luck getting them implemented.  Lobbyists for corn, ethanol, soybeans, and the like prefer to keep those subsidies coming, and they have huge power over Congress.

I am indebted to Food Safety News for this item: FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN) has issued a statement:  COVID-19 is not a food safety issue (see my previous posts on this).

• Food does not spread the virus.
• Food packaging does not spread the virus.

Highlights of the FAO’s conclusions:

• Coronaviruses cannot multiply in food or on inanimate surfaces; they can only multiply in humans and certain animals. Once in the environment, viruses degrade and becomes less infectious.
• It is important to note that, although the detection of virus or viral ribonucleic acid (RNA) remnants on foods and food packaging provides evidence of previous contamination and is not disputed, there is no confirmation of SARS-CoV-2, or any other respiratory illness-causing virus, being transmitted by food or food packaging and causing illnesses in people who touch the contaminated food products or packaging.
• The virus responsible for COVID-19 is susceptible to most commonly used disinfectants and sanitizing agents used in the food processing environment. Standard cleaning and sanitizing procedures…should therefore be effective at disinfecting the food processing environment.

Well, at least that, and what a relief.

That still leaves us with these preventive measures: vaccinate, mask up, and avoid unmasked crowds.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has just released the latest iteration of its annual report on the State of Food Insecurity in the World 2012.

It’s bottom line estimate: 870 million people in the world are hungry, 852 million of them in developing countries.

The good news is that this figure represents a decline of 132 million people from 1990-92 to 2010-12, or from 18.6 percent to 12.5 percent of the world’s population.  In developing countries, the decline is from 23.2 percent to 14.9 percent.

The not-so-good news: Since 2007-2008, global progress in reducing hunger has slowed and leveled off, and hunger in Africa has gotten worse.

Much of the press attention to the report yawned at the major message but instead focused on errors in the previous estimates, which were higher.

the projections were wrong. They were calculated using figures from non-U.N. sources that were fed into the U.N.’s number-crunching model, because FAO was expected to quickly come up with an estimate of how many people might go hungry from the dual crises of high food prices and the global downturn

The UN bases its hunger projections on figures on population, food supply, food losses, dietary energy requirements, food distribution, and other factors.

The report contains other bad news.  While 870 million people remain hungry, the world confronts a double burden of malnutrition: 1.4 billion people are dealing with the consequences of overweight and obesity.

Focusing on the need to address world hunger Sir Gordon Conway, Professor of International Development, Imperial College, London writes in the Huffington Post:

as I set out in my latest book One billion hungry: can we feed the world?, I believe there is reason for optimism. Yes we can feed the world, but only if we accept that agricultural development is the best route to achieving sustainable economic growth in developing countries, and achieve an agriculture that is highly productive, stable, resilient and equitable.

Sounds like a good plan to me.  Let’s get busy.

It’s bad enough that corn is grown for ethanol, but cassava?  Many populations depend on cassava for food.

According to today’s New York Times, cassava is the new “go to” crop to burn for fuel.  Doing this, of course, prices cassava beyond what people can afford:

It can be tricky predicting how new demand from the biofuel sector will affect the supply and price of food. Sometimes, as with corn or cassava, direct competition between purchasers drives up the prices of biofuel ingredients. In other instances, shortages and price inflation occur because farmers who formerly grew crops like vegetables for consumption plant different crops that can be used for fuel.

The Times graph of the increase in use of food for biofuel is sobering:

New York Times, April 7, 2011

The rise in food prices has stopped temporarily, but prices are still an astonishing 37% higher than a year ago, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. 

None of this makes sense to me.  We need a sensible food policy and a sensible energy policy.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has proposed the nation’s first aquaculture policy, which it says it did in response to consumer demand for local, safe, sustainably produced seafood (FoodNavigator.com has a good summary).

Ah yes.  Seafood.  The wild west of the food industry.  Safe and sustainable sounds good, but the statistics are not reassuring.

As NOAA explains, U.S. aquaculture – meaning farmed – currently only accounts for about 5% of our seafood.  Get this: an astonishing 84% of U.S. seafood is imported. Of this, half is farmed.

Worldwide, farmed seafood exceeded catches of wild seafood for the first time in 2009.

NOAA guesses that with wild fish stocks depleting rapidly, we will see plenty more fish and shellfish farming.

NOAA quotes the depressing Food and Agriculture Organization report on world fisheries and aquaculture.  This says that worldwide per capita fish availability is about 17 kg per year, and supplies more than 3 billion people with at least 15% of their average animal protein intake.  No wild fish stock can keep up with that kind of demand.

NOAA’s yawn-inducing recommendations (edited):

• Enable sustainable aquaculture…in harmony with healthy, productive, and resilient marine ecosystems
• Ensure agency decisions to protect wild species and coastal and ocean ecosystems
• Advance scientific knowledge concerning sustainable aquaculture
• Make timely and unbiased aquaculture management decisions
• Support aquaculture innovation and investments that benefit the nation’s coastal
• ecosystems, communities, seafood consumers, industry, and economy.
• Advance public understanding of sustainable aquaculture practices
• Work with our federal partners to provide resources and expertise needed to address aquaculture challenges
• Work internationally to learn from aquaculture practices around the world

It’s going to take a lot more than that to fix the fish situation.