The planet is expected to reach a staggering 10 billion inhabitants in the next century, and the question of how to achieve food security becomes relevant. The current food system is actually not up to this task: it is no longer able to ensure that the world's population is fed and is contributing to environmental destruction. Radical reform is long overdue.
In 2022, around 735 million people worldwide suffered from hunger. About 828 million suffered from malnutrition and nearly 148 million children under five were affected by rickets. Lack of access to fresh, nutritious food has also contributed to a rise in obesity in many communities as people have been forced to resort to unhealthy foods. Obesity puts you at risk for chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes, heart failure, stroke, cancer and high blood pressure.
Poor nutrition in all its forms (underweight, overweight and micronutrient deficiencies) increases a person's susceptibility to infection and fuels a harmful cycle of negative health consequences. Meanwhile, the constant struggle to get enough nutrition – and even to avoid starvation – has consequences for one's mental health, leading to anxiety, stress and depression, among other things. As a recent United Nations report highlights, the right to food and the right to health are inextricably linked.
The food system also causes severe environmental damage. It is responsible for around a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions and is therefore a key driver of climate change. Likewise, almost half of the world's living space is dedicated to agriculture. Areas once inhabited by lush forests and other wild areas – including large swaths of the Amazon rainforest, which is critical to the health of our planet – have been cleared to make way for agriculture, with devastating consequences for biodiversity .
The food system is responsible for about a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions
The problem is compounded by the widespread use of pesticides, which – even at relatively low levels of exposure – have numerous negative health and environmental impacts for agricultural workers and for local communities and ecosystems. Contamination of the La Pasión River in Guatemala with malathion, a pesticide used on palm oil plantations, led to the deaths of thousands of fish and deprived around 12,000 people of their main source of food and livelihood.
The poor and marginalized suffer disproportionately from the consequences of food system failures, particularly in the Global South. Malnutrition is particularly common in low-income populations or among people living in poverty. In high-income countries such as Australia, the risk of obesity among Indigenous populations is 1.5 times higher than among non-Indigenous populations in comparable areas.
It also doesn't help that 60% of the global proprietary seed market is controlled by four agrochemical companies based in high-income countries. The seeds supplied by these companies – which farmers in low-income countries rely on – are often destined for crops that lack nutritional diversity or do not meet the nutritional needs of local communities.
The current system is clearly not fit for purpose. And efforts to improve this are fundamentally inadequate because they fail to take into account the deep connections between nutrition, health and the environment. Instead of tackling each issue individually, it would be better to implement a human rights-related strategy. Recognizing that the rights to food, health and a clean environment are indivisible and interdependent would benefit all three simultaneously. As the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights affirms, all people have the right to access not only to health facilities but also to the underlying determinants of health, such as nutritious food and a sustainable environment.
The first step is a comprehensive UN treaty on food systems that takes into account all relevant rights and actors and mitigates health and environmental damage along the entire food value chain. Such a treaty must reflect the needs and priorities of low-income countries and vulnerable groups such as people living in poverty, displaced persons, and women and children. It must incorporate local knowledge of the entire food system, from production, processing and packaging to promotion, distribution, sales and consumption. By engaging local communities, the NOURISHING policy framework developed by the World Cancer Research Fund could provide valuable insights.
As rising food prices have pushed hunger to the top of the global agenda, the world has a unique opportunity to adopt a human rights-based approach to food and lay the foundation for a future. healthier, fairer and more sustainable.
Oyinlola Oyebode is Professor of Public Health at Queen Mary University of London. Yureshya Perera is a research fellow at the University of Warwick. Tlaleng Mofokeng She is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to health and an associate professor of law at Georgetown University. Sharifah Sekalala She is Professor of Law at the University of Warwick.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2023.
You can follow Future planet In XFacebook, Instagram and TikTok and subscribe to our newsletter here.