Food sovereignty and health

Food sovereignty and nutrition in East and Southern Africa: a synthesis of case study evidence
Authors: M. Chopra; M. Tomlinson Produced by: EQUINET: Network for Equity in Health in Southern Africa, 2007

The paper investigates the design and implementation of three important nutrition responses in ESA: food aid; HIV/AIDS-related nutrition interventions; and school feeding programmes. The paper finds that many of the programmes in ESA have no food sovereignty component, but are instead focused narrowly on food security. Food sovereignty includes prioritising local food production, offering fair prices for farmers, protecting farmers' access to seeds, land, water and other resources; and recognising and promoting the role of women in food production. (thanks Mona)

Available online

The fat picture

"WE KNOW the world is warming and we know humans are causing it, but the headaches really start when we try to predict how hot it will get. This is partly because of the many subtle environmental and lifestyle factors driving climate change.

One of these is the feedback that could amplify warming. Once the powerful greenhouse gas methane starts to be released from warming oceans or permafrost, it could rapidly ratchet up the global thermostat. The same goes for decreasing snow and ice cover. Because of this, researchers are keeping a close eye on the oceans, ice caps, forests and tundra for signs of such changes.

Now consider what may seem a more unlikely driver of climate change: the global obesity epidemic. We tend to think of obesity only as a public-health problem, but many of its causes overlap with those of global warming. Car dependence and labour-saving devices have cut the energy people expend as they go about their lives, at the same time increasing the amount of fossil fuel they burn. It's no coincidence that obesity is most prevalent in the US, where per capita carbon emissions exceed those of any other major nation, and it is becoming clear that obese people are having a direct impact on the climate. This is happening through their lifestyles and the amount and type of food they eat, and the worse the obesity epidemic gets the greater its impact on global warming.

"Obesity is most prevalent in the US, where per capita carbon emissions are the highest of any major nation"

One reason is the extra food that obese people eat - about 40 per cent more in terms of calories than their lean counterparts. Since food production accounts for over 20 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions - more than transport or industry - an obese population leaves a significantly heavier carbon footprint than a thin one. Fats and refined sugars, which tend to dominate the diets of obese people, are particularly carbon intensive. Greater food consumption means more organic waste, which produces methane as it decomposes.

The wide availability of food is a relatively modern phenomenon, born partly of the revolution in agriculture that kicked off in the 1940s. Before then, the amount of food that could be harvested from a piece of land was limited by the nutrients and water available naturally in the soil. Seemingly limitless supplies of oil changed everything. Over the second half of the 20th century, fertilisers, pesticides, irrigation and mechanisation - all dependent on fossil fuels - dramatically increased food yields. As the physicist Albert Bartlett observed: "Modern agriculture is the use of land to turn petroleum into food." Coupled with sedentary lifestyles, the increased availability of food has helped the number of obese adults worldwide to quadruple over the past 25 years.

Demand for food is not the only way in which obesity has dire consequences for the climate. Consider what happens to someone on the path to obesity. It might start when he (or she, of course) decides to drive rather than walk the half mile to the office, just to get there a few minutes earlier. A year on he might have gained a kilogram of fat, and as the weight continues to pile on he eventually finds it harder to move around and is loath to walk or cycle anywhere. Then the medical problems start: back pain, arthritis and shortness of breath, or worse. Obesity increases the risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, osteoarthritis, infertility, gallstones and several types of cancer.

By now he'll be suffering low self-esteem, which leads to comfort eating and perhaps heavier drinking too. He'll even notice a load on his household energy bills: his greater bulk and higher metabolic rate will cause him to feel the heat more in the globally warmed summers, and he will be the first to turn on the energy-intensive air conditioning.

The result is more food intake, more vehicle use and greater reliance on medical services, all of which use prodigious amounts of energy. And as the number of obese people increases, a kind of positive feedback kicks in. Obese people in the US are already throwing their political weight around. The American Obesity Association is dedicated to "changing public policy and perceptions about obesity". How long before there are calls for energy-guzzling escalators, moving sidewalks and motorised mobility aids? The social stigma attached to obesity is one of the few forces slowing the epidemic - even though obesity is not a personal failing but a problem of society. We live in an environment that serves primarily the financial interests of the corporations that sell food, cars and petroleum.

The Stern review on the economics of climate change, published by the British government in October 2006, warned of the dire ecological consequences of continuing a "business as usual" approach to greenhouse gas emissions. That applies equally to the obesity epidemic, which is spiralling out of control. Pandemic obesity is an energy vortex. It is time to treat it as the potential global environmental catastrophe that it is."

Ian Roberts is professor of public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

From issue 2610 of New Scientist magazine, 27 June 2007, page 21

Free trade?

"In the latest move against Chinese imports, the Food and Drug Administration Thursday effectively blocked the sale of five types of farm-raised seafood from China because of repeated instances of contamination from unapproved animal drugs and food additives."

look at my previous post on apple and at previous posts on the food quality issue with US imports and at the repeated requests of the Lebanese farmers to impose health and quality standards on imports. This is the new protectionism. Lets inflict it upon them.

Sterilizing culture

"The EU wants to stop the sale of dairy products made without modern sterilisation, cooling and transportation equipment - an impossibility for poor men who eke out a living in a wild and beautiful place where running water means a mountain stream and electricity only flows in the lightning that crackles over their pastures.

'I've been doing this 43 years and it hasn't changed,' said Aurel Cotinghi in the pungent little cabin where he makes cheese, as his two sons continue milking outside. 'Now I suppose things will change, but no one has explained it properly to us. Sometime, someone will have to tell us what to do or they will just close us down.'

'If we lose the sheep from the mountains, we have lost the mountains: the whole ecosystem will be destroyed and the wild animals will come to villages looking for food,' said Gontea. For Cotinghi's 19-year-old son Bogdan there is little to recommend this tough existence. 'Perhaps I'll be a carpenter,' he said as his father prepared a lunch of bread, cheese and spring onions. 'There's no way I'm doing this for the rest of my life.'" (thanks Rania)

Everywhere around the world, urban people who have lost most of their natural immunity from living in an over-sterilized world are passing laws that control the sanitary quality of foods. There is outcry in all of Europe, where not only farmers, but also food culture appreciators are fighting these laws. While there should be basic food health regulations, these should be edicted and implemented after having developed a good understanding of traditional processes which have been at work for so long without causing any major catastrophy. The new regulations favor most large scale industrial operators at the expense of the small producers, and cause the dissolution of the geographic specificity of products which is replaced by brand homogeneity.

Without small producers, rural culture disappears.

Promoting a healthy diet among the poor

"California no longer issues paper food stamps. Eligible recipients of food assistance in California are now issued a debit card called a "Golden State Advantage" card (known also as an "EBT card" or a "food stamp card"), and access their food benefits electronically by swiping their card when they buy food at the grocery store. California Farmers' Markets, and other outdoor food markets and produce stands, do not usually have the electricity and phone lines needed for all eligible food vendors to deal with electronic benefit transfers. Therefore, many such markets allow all eligible food vendors to sell eligible food products to EBT cardholders by setting up a Central Point of Sale (POS) Device to sell market scrip to customers, who can then shop in the market with the scrip. This system requires the market management to become authorized to accept EBT food benefits and to organize and promote the use of EBT cards at the market."

My friend Annie who sent me this link adds:

"Food stamps for low-income persons and families were issued as paper coupons in the past. In 2004, Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) replaced the traditional paper issues. It functions like a debit card/account for people to use. The Ecology Center, Berkeley coordinated efforts with several state, county, public, and community organizations to enabled certified organic farmers' markets to accept the EBT cards ( the California Farmers' Market Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) Implementation and Promotion Project) Basically, allowing recipients of food stamp benefits to have access to local organic markets. Which is a great way of promoting healthy diets among the poor, as well as sustainable living."

Facilitating access of the poor to healthy, nutritious food is often neglected. During the Israeli war on lebanon of July-August 2006, relief agencies were distributing tons of dry food to the refugees from the South and the Southern suburbs. The aim was to cover the need in calories without addressing nutrition needs. Healthy Basket, a company working in the marketing of organic produce started distributing fresh fruits and vegetables. The success was immediate, as people were starved for fresh produce.

In the current Nahr el Bared crisis, the Nahr el Bared relief Campaign started by purchasing and distributing dry food (powdered milk, tinned food). As other, more established relief outfits started moving in, the NBRC started distributing vouchers for the value of LBP5,000 ($3.3), which can be exchanged for fresh fruits and vegetables in some of the shops of the refugee camps. This is proving to be very popular and very successful, as people do not have access to cash and cannot spend on essential fresh produce.

Can it get more callous than this?

"Being a human guinea pig may be work that westerners no longer want to do, but that doesn't rule it out as a good deal for the poor, who benefit from the best care and get paid for it. If factories can be relocated to take advantage of lower salaries or less rigorous environmental constraints, why not clinical trials? "They said [I was] taking advantage," complained an industry researcher criticised for conducting trials in poor countries. "But without that trial, those children would be dead." "I think it is usually good for people to be in clinical trials," said FDA medical director Robert Temple. "Half of the people [get an active drug] and better care. The other half...[get] better care."" (thanks Kirsten)