News

By Kathleen Kevany

A number of significant events have occurred these past weeks but few with the potential to concurrently impact economic, health, environmental and social outcomes.

This past week at the UN Committee on World Food Security in Rome, the report “Unravelling the Food-Health Nexus – Addressing Practices, Political Economy and Power Relations to Build Healthier Food Systems” from the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES) and the Global Alliance for the Future of Food was released. This report calls for collaborative and proactive actions to remedy the many harmful outcomes arising from dysfunctional and detrimental aspects of our food systems.

A second important gathering was with the FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva addressing the G7 Agriculture Ministers at their 15 October 2017 meeting in Bergamo.  He stressed the role of agriculture and rural development in preventing as well as offering responses to conflicts, migration and food security.

The IPES and FOA events stress several key messages and actions. While many positive impacts arise from our food systems, they increasingly are generating severe human and economic costs due to unhealthy work conditions; exposure to contaminants in the water, soil, and air; eating of unsafe or contaminated foods; engaging in unhealthy diets and greater economic concentration in agriculture while essential supports for rural development are declining.

Both the UN and FAO call for needed reforms in food and farming systems like chemical-intensive agriculture; intensive livestock production; the mass production and mass marketing of ultra-processed foods and the development of long and deregulated global commodity supply chains and protection of land and rural livelihoods.  Timely actions are called for to enhance health impacts of food systems that are interconnected, self-reinforcing and complex – including influences from climate change, unsanitary conditions and poverty. 

Adverse impacts from food systems, like precarious working conditions across global food systems, disproportionately afflict marginalized populations.  At the heart of the food–health nexus is power — to achieve visibility, frame narratives, set the terms of debate and influence policy and public practice. While increasing yield and economies of scale, industrial food and farming models systematically generate negative health impacts and unequal power relations. Root causes of poor health and social-health inequalities must be addressed. Healthy science-policy interactions along with reforms to food systems practices are needed to get beyond partial solutions ill-adapted to address the systemic and interconnected risks emerging from food systems.

Action must increasingly be informed by a diversity of actors, sources of knowledge and disciplines. In the IPES report, five co-dependent leverage points were identified for building healthier food systems

1) promoting food systems thinking at all levels
2) reasserting scientific integrity and research as a public good
3) bringing the positive impacts of alternative food systems to light
4) adopting the precautionary principle and
5) building integrated food policies under participatory governance.

Building healthier food systems requires more democratic and integrated ways of managing risk and governing food systems with policymakers, big and small private sector firms, healthcare providers, environmental groups, consumers’ and health advocates, farmers, agri-food workers, and citizens collaborating and sharing responsibility.

Messages emphasizing the need to position and promote sustainable food systems are growing in volume and frequency. Earlier this year Pamela Mason and Tim Lang, respected authorities and ardent advocates for sustainable food systems, released their comprehensive book on Sustainable Diets: How Ecological Nutrition Can Transform Consumption and the Food System. Just last month James Cameron, the famous movie director and his wife Suzy Amis Cameron were in Saskatchewan to publicly launch a firm that it the top producer in North America of organic pea protein.  Such is the fanfare and attraction to the evolving or re-emerging “greens-economy”.

Innova Market Insights says that plants are trending upward in new product marketing with a 63 per cent increase in 2016. Innovation with greens and plant-based foods are predicted to make billions. In Nova Scotia a recent forum on greenhouse technology and expanding market share of fruits and vegetables was hosted at Dalhousie’s Faculty of Agriculture.

Many opportunities and pathways for engagement await those interested in infusing food systems with sustainable principles and practices. Who will be prepared to harness the positive potential of these transformative movements?

For the IPES Full Report and for more details on the FAO meeting