Governments should intervene where industry has failed for healthier diets: UN food expert
In a report presented to the UN Human Rights Council, United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter, said that governments need to take the reins from food companies to ensure the promotion and provision of foods that are central to healthy diets, at reasonable prices.
“Urbanization, supermarketization and the global spread of modern lifestyles have shaken up traditional food habits. The result is a public health disaster,” he said. “Governments have been focusing on increasing calorie availability, but they have often been indifferent to what kind of calories are on offer, at what price, to whom they are accessible, and how they are marketed.”
De Schutter said that “the right to food cannot be reduced to a right not to starve”, and outlined five areas in which governments could help to put nutrition at the center of global food systems, in both the developed and developing world.
His recommendations are:
- taxing unhealthy products;
- regulating foods high in saturated fats, salt and sugar;
- cracking down on junk food advertising;
- overhauling misguided agricultural subsidies that make certain ingredients cheaper than others;
- supporting local food production so that consumers have access to healthy, fresh and nutritious foods.
He also highlighted that US food companies spent $8.5bn to advertise food, candy and non-alcoholic drinks in 2010, while $44m was budgeted for the CDC’s Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity budget.
“We have deferred to food companies the responsibility for ensuring that a good nutritional balance emerges,” he said. “Voluntary guidelines and piecemeal nutrition initiatives have failed to create a system with the right signals, and the odds remain stacked against the achievement of a healthy, balanced diet.”
He said that global governmental food policies largely have been focused on increasing production rather than improving nutrition since the 1960s, and claims that this has prompted “an overemphasis on increasing agricultural outputs and lowering food prices, while scant attention was paid to ensuring the availability of and accessibility to a wide range of diverse foods containing the micronutrients necessary for the full physical and mental development of children, and for adults to lead healthy and productive lives.”
The full report is available as a PDF download here.
