It is time to stop the big food turning propelled by large companies. This means taxation, regulations and healthy school meals | Stuart Gillespie
OYour food system kills us. Designed in a different century for a different purpose – to mass produce cheap calories to prevent famine – it is now a source of danger, destroying more than it creates. A quarter of all adult deaths worldwide – more than 12 million people each year – are due to bad diets.
Malnutrition in all its forms – nutrition, micronutrient deficiencies, overweight and obesity – is by far the greatest cause of poor health, affecting one in three people on the planet. Ultra-treble foods are involved in up to a premature death out of seven in some countries.
Each country is affected by malnutrition, but it is the poorest and most marginalized people who are most likely to become badly nourished, fall sick and die too early. Our food system is also disgusting our planet – generating a third of all greenhouse gas emissions and causing a series of environmental damage.
As savings develops, countries are going from rural and low -productive agricultural systems – focused on basic foods – to more diverse systems, including legumes and nutrients, and on marketed systems, flooded with ultra -processed foods.
North world has started to move through this food transition in the middle of the last century – there are about three generations. Many countries in Latin America and Asia have made the same trip in a single generation and Africa is now becoming more obese because it passes to ultra-tail food.
The global food system has been captured by some raptor transnational companies that take advantage of poor public health while using a range of tactics to prevent governments from getting on their way. When seen through the prism of power, it looks more like a breakage than a food transition.
We must transform the system into the one in which the health of people and the planet is priority over implacable motivation for profit. It is too late for progressive changes and yet more refining on the fringes – we need a radical overhaul.
Everyone has a role in overthrowing it, but we need governments to direct, to establish the rules and govern.
First, governments must have budgets to obtain healthy foods (and limit ultra-transformed foods) for schools, government agencies, hospitals and clinics. In Kenya, Food4education has delivered more than 21 million hot nutritious meals to schoolchildren. Tens of thousands of young children are well fed every day, keeping them in school and capable of learning. The Kenyan government is working with the charitable organization to evolve its operations to cover all schools by the end of the decade.
In Brazil, the government finances healthy meals for millions of students in public schools, a third of which must be purchased from local farmers who practice organic and little carbon farming.
The momentum is building. School plans now take place in almost all countries, reaching more than 400 million children at a cost of around $ 48 billion per year, and 108 countries have gathered in a global coalition of school meals.
Second, governments have the power to regulate advertising, labeling and marketing of unhealthy ultra-transformed foods.
For Guido Girardi, a senator in Chile, it was simple: children’s right to food and health was violated by predatory marketing of ultra-treated food. From 2006 to 2022, Girardi fought against the food industry and his political colleagues to publicize the regulations. But Chile now leads the world in terms of package of complete measures that include package labels, media marketing restrictions on children, 18% of sugary drinks taxes and the prohibition of sale and marketing of junk food in schools.
A title from the 2018 New York Times proclaimed the murder of Tony The Tiger while cartoons have been removed from cereal packs in Chile. In one year, driven by these new laws, children’s exposure to announcements dropped by 73%. In three years, the consumption of calories, salt and sugar of regulated products across the country had dropped a third. Pack -front nutrition labels are now on products from Peru, Israel, Mexico, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil and Colombia, with others in the pipeline in Africa and Asia.
The third action required concerns of taxes and subsidies. Governments can disincle the purchase of unhealthy foods (thanks to the taxation of harmful products) while making tax dividends to encourage healthier food purchases, such as subsidies for low -income families.
In Mexico, the idea of introducing a tax on sugary drinks has been debated for several years in the 2010 years, after the public health disaster of the presidency of Vicente Fox, former Coca-Cola director general in Latin America. In a classic case of the rotating door between the public service and the private sector, Fox had brought its Coca-Cola friends to direct the key departments in 2000.
In 2006, one in six adults in Mexico suffered from diabetes, with 40,000 deaths per year attributed to the over-consumption of carbonated drinks. Despite a strong decline in the drinks industry in 2014, a new government launched the first world tax on sugary drinks. Two years later, sales of these drinks fell 12%, while water sales increased by a similar percentage. The biggest advantage has been observed in the poorest households.
Taxes work. More than 120 countries covering more than half of the world’s population have started to implement them. It is a huge world success that is now extended beyond sugary drinks. Colombia was the first country in Latin America to introduce a tax on ultra-transformed products in November 2023. These interventions operated, and when joined in a complete national policy, supported by several government services, they can be transformers.
Our global food system does not feed us. The good news is that we now know why, and we know enough to change things. We must exploit the growing number of evidence and experience around the world to propel ourselves into the better food future – one with people and a planet in his heart.
