Wednesday October 16th marks the celebration of the World Food Day, as established by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) to commemorate the founding of the organization in 1945. As it happens with these flagship days, they are meant to act as a reminder and to offer the opportunity to open discussions and reflections on a variety of aspects that concern the whole of humanity -in this case, the question of food.

By Silvana Juri

The topic for 2019 is set as: ”Healthy Diets for a Zero Hunger World” and falls under a larger umbrella and a call to action to address food-related issues during the UN Decade of Action on Nutrition (2016-2025), while aligned within the wider 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. They key message this year is that it is possible to end hunger and all forms of malnutrition within our lifetimes if efforts, collaborations and clear goals are set up and adopted from all sectors.

However, the reason for drawing our attention to these issues comes at a special time coinciding with a widespread attention and understanding that the health of people and the planet are currently not going in the most desireable trajectories we would have hoped. As proven by a wide list of reports that have been published this year (*see references), we have come to realize that even though science and technology, and hence, knowledge in general has, in the last century, shown giant progress offering diverse solutions and insights that promised to help us out of some of our messes, we have come to understand that despite some improvements have been made, we are certainly offtrack from where we thought we could be.

As the latest report on the State of Global Hunger and Nutrition 2019 states, even though most of the world’s population is now urban, and the advances of technology have enabled humanity to inhabit a more interconnected world, this “progress” has not necessarily resulted in positive outcomes and growth for all of the world population, let alone, for the natural systems that support life. Today, more than 820 million people in the world are hungry which will likely have negative repercussions for the future generations and their economic, social and natural systems.

We are now inhabiting the Anthropocene, a new era characterised by the impact that humans have on the Earth’s system processes, to the point of competing as a planetary force able to push its limits to the point of uncertainty, vastly challenging the possibility of a safe operating space for humanity (link to Planetary Boundaries if wish). A series of different reports being published this year have also brought our attention to the understanding of the synergies that exist within our global food systems and other phenomena such as climate change, obesity and undernutrition, within a wider context of global biodiversity loss, earth system instability, and socio-economic unrest. Lancet’s Commission Report on “The Global Syndemic of Obesity, Undernutrition, and Climate Change” (2019) has helped stress the persistence of a global obesity epidemic, which currently accounts for 1 out of 9 people on the face of the Earth. Understanding obesity as a syndemic -or sinergetic epidemic, implies the understanding of the prevailing presence of two or more diseases that interact and negatively affect each other and to draw our attention to the reciprocal interactions and feedback loops that exist when thinking about how to achieve a sustainable and “healthy body weight for people, and a healthy ecosystem for the survival of our planet” (Kleinert and Horton, 2019). We are, in essence, talking about the wicked problem that obesity represents, one that is not only persistent and seemingly never ending, but also affecting an immense array of areas, aspects and actors.

What is often the case with this type of problem is the need to look beyond our most usual approaches for understanding and framing such problems, that is, by trying to artificially set boundaries, often times influenced by our own personal capacities to understand and deal with the problem, and hence, the obvious limitations when suggesting solutions or new directions. This type of synergistic problem requires a systemic, holistic understanding and engagement, which calls for an inclusion of all actors having a stake in it. Moreover, it pushes us to try and analyse business models, food systems, local and international governance structures and policies together with the role of civil society and other organizations and institutions. What the syndemic of obesity has shown is that the current trajectory of this problem is moving towards further negative configurations, making not only ourselves but our global societies and the whole planet more vulnerable. This vulnerability is easily witnessed through the vast inequalities that exist today globally; especially in terms of access to the information, tools, and resources that are needed to fulfill our most important and fundamental needs.

We have come to realize that to talk about health and wellbeing, a more holistic understanding of the interrelations and mutual affectation between ecological and human systems is required, and hence, that there is a need to start understanding wellbeing being as part of the broader concept of Planetary Health . This change of perspective represents a large move and attempt at dissolving our inherited overly structured worldviews and dualistic thinking that makes us see a compartmentalized world and understand ourselves as being separate from the natural world. Even more, the realization that the type of knowledge that is required to help us move away from these intricate problems is not going to emerge from a single discipline or science. Rather, to truly grasp the multifaceted and complex nature of any real problem, collaboration across all fields of knowledge together with the reintegration of other wisdoms and voices –usually excluded from official conversations, is a must.

As FAO’s “The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World” (2019) report states, hunger is now understood not only as undernourishment or insufficient nutrients or calories, but rather, also encompassing different degrees of food insecurity –alterations to the nutritional quality and quantity of an individual. Food insecurity today manifests and coexist in varying levels around the world, ranging from severe, in the cases of those who have run out of food, experienced hunger and/or gone for days without eating, to moderate, in the cases where people face uncertainties about their ability to obtain food usually being forced to reduce the quality and/or quantity of food they consume due to lack of money or other resources. When hunger and food insecurity are combined, we find that “over 2 billion people ( >26% of global population) around the world do not have regular access to safe, nutritious and sufficient food” –a phenomena that is seen not only in lower and middle income countries but also across North America and Europe (accounting for 8% of this total).

On top of this, malnutrition, which goes on to include vitamin and mineral deficiencies, stunting, wasting, overweight and obesity now affects roughly 1 in 3 people around the world, which depicts a continuing rising trend showing signals of being off-track to achieve the 2025 target of not increasing its prevalence among the population of young people ( as seen in the “Atlas of Childhood Obesity” by Lobstein and Brinsden, 2019).

Food insecurity is directly connected to obesity as being one of the main risk factors, explaining how sometimes, both undernourishment and obesity coexist within countries and households. Inequalities are usually found to be the root of these problems. Around the world, and especially in the case of Latin America, the prevalence of food insecurity is slightly higher among women than men. More broadly, the report has helped understand how all all forms of social exclusion and marginalization, especially seen through income inequalities, increase the risks of undernutrition and obesity. Furthermore, this impact has mostly been noticed worldwide in the case of countries that rely heavily on primary commodity exports and/or imports. They have been the ones to mostly have experienced true economic shocks and slowdowns, leading the trend on how their diets are immediately affected, but also, their overall access to health.

So, what are the main reasons for this increasing and ever worsening global scenario? If we were to sum it up in one word, it would be that the lack of diversity and redundancy leads to a lack of resilience. One of the main aspects preventing people from achieving healthy and appropriate diets (diverse) is their inability to have access to adequate food (as evidenced in food deserts and swamps). Social and economic inequalities exacerbated lately by a fragile global economic state has led to the development of nutrition crisis situations in some parts of the globe. A state of political conflict and instability, tied up with the massive effect that the global changing economies and trades have had on the economies of countries that rely on a few commodity crop exports, has proven to have enduring effects on people’s abilities to make ends meet, forcing them to adopt different strategies to cope with such shocks –usually compromising diet quality and quantity. The aspect of quality leads us to analyze the type of product being consumed, how it has been supplied and from where, and where it has been produced, how and by whom. Through the production to commercialization phase, we have seen how the intensification and the over-reliance on a few commercial crops worldwide has put communities in a very vulnerable state not only as sources of livelihoods but also health. Most people around the world are now obtaining most of their dietary energy supply by relying on only three crops (wheat, maize and rice), despite the large and diverse availability of edible species and foodstuffs that exists worldwide. This lack of redundancy in the palette of possible flavours, ingredients and their related knowledge and skills severely undermines the resiliency of our current global food systems and with that, as we have seen, people’s ability to nourish themselves. In addition, the type of production and consumption modes driving these trends is also massively eroding the natural resources upon which we all rely on, severely diminishing our global fresh water sources and eroding our soils and all the biodiversity embedded in them. In turn, when considering the effects of all other phases during the production-consumption-waste cycle, food represents one of the leading causes of anthropocentric-led climate change. This poor management of our relationship with ourselves and with the wider communities of living beings, humans and nonhumans has led us to severely threaten and limit the capacities we have of ensuring not only a positive and just food future but rather, the possibility of a future as a species as a whole.

In this sense, it is ample time we take on the challenge of truly addressing the global, wicked, interconnected issues that hide behind our dishes and diets and start enacting ways to truly transform the way we produce, process, circulate and eat our food. One of the key directions will be to develop a strategy towards nutrition-sensitive agriculture, one that is aligned and embedded within the larger systems that it is a part of, respecting and managing both the natural and social capital in an equitable and truly nurturing way, putting nutrition quality over quantity first. To achieve this, collaboration is essential when trying to setup new policies, guidelines and programs that can address some of the largest barriers to change that stem from economic inequalities, a widespread lack of access to investments, decent and just sources of livelihoods, clear consumer information and health-enabling environments, among others.

Last but not least, this requires a concerted effort among all professionals, academics and decision-makers to step out of the silos and truly address the problems as they exist in reality, complex, messy, interconnected -essentially without real borders between who gets to stay in or out of the conversation. After all, food is the only thing that truly and literally connect and unites us all.

As part of the continuing discussion on the problems and challenges that exist within our food systems, SARAS Institute has been working on a two-year cycle addressing the broad topic of Food and Sustainability as part of the series of Public Conferences. A group of transdisciplinary actors have been engaged in developing this conversation and will meet next December 2019 to lay out a plan of action for larger activities due to take place in 2020.

For more information and to get in touch with the team, visit Tasting Sustainability in Uruguay

1 *Planetary health refers to the “the health of human civilization and the state of the natural systems on which it depends”. This concept was put forth in 2015 by the Rockefeller Foundation-Lancet Commission on planetary health to transform the field of public health, which has traditionally focused on the health of human populations without considering natural systems.

References:

EAT. 2019. “Summary Report of the EAT-Lancet Commission. Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems.”. EAT Foundation. https://eatforum.org/content/uploads/2019/07/EAT-Lancet_Commission_Summary_Report.pdf

FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP, WHO. 2019. “The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World. Safeguarding against Economic Slowdowns.” https://doi.org/10.1109/JSTARS.2014.2300145.

FAO. 2019. “Healthy Diets for a Zero Hunger World”. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. January 1, 2019. http://www.fao.org/3/ca5268en/ca5268en.pdf.

Kleinert, Sabine, and Richard Horton. 2019. “Obesity Needs to Be Put into a Much Wider Context.” The Lancet. Lancet Publishing Group. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(18)33192-1.

Swinburn, Boyd A., Vivica I. Kraak, Steven Allender, Vincent J. Atkins, Phillip I. Baker, Jessica R. Bogard, Hannah Brinsden, et al. 2019. “The Global Syndemic of Obesity, Undernutrition, and Climate Change: The Lancet Commission Report.” The Lancet 393 (10173): 791–846. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(18)32822-8.

WOF. 2019. “Atlas of Childhood Obesity”. Edited by Tim Lobstein and Hannah Brinsden. World Obesity Federation. http://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/wof-files/11996_Childhood_Obesity_Atlas_Report_ART_V2.pdf.