Here’s a fact that is hard to swallow: we are producing more food than ever to feed a growing population yet one in three of us is suffering from malnutrition.
The paradox, known as the double burden of malnutrition, underscores the severity of the food crisis that the world is facing.
Currently, some 2 billion people are overweight or obese while 830 million go to bed hungry every night. But the problem isn’t just human heath – it’s also about planetary health.
Ramping up food production using current techniques threatens further deforestation and a rise in greenhouse gas emissions. Making this all the more galling is that it is perfectly possible to provide healthy, affordable and environmentally sustainable meals to all.
What’s needed is a little more imaginative thinking. To experts such as Dr Sandro Demaio, Chief Executive of VicHealth, an independent statutory authority in the Australian state of Victoria, food, or rather how we produce and consume it, is at the root of many of the socio-economic, environmental and health-related problems that have plagued the planet since the 2010s.
Whether it is chronic disease, global warming, or even the Covid-19 pandemic, our relationship with food is usually a contributing factor, he says.
“Food is a cross-cutting ‘red thread’ central to many of our major global challenges,” Dr Demaio says. “A fundamental understanding is that we need to change the way we produce, consume and waste food through addressing our food systems.”
Cost of cheap snacks
Overhauling the global food system is no easy task. It involves making changes to production, processing, packaging, transportation, marketing, consumption and disposal. In other words, current practices, which prioritise consumption over human and planetary health, need to be re-imagined.
A first step would involve putting an end to flooding the market with convenient, calorie-rich but nutrition-poor snacks, buy-one-get-one-free offers at supermarkets and oversized portions at restaurants.
“If we can produce cheap but unhealthy calories that taste great, then incentivise demand through heavy advertising, and sell it for an artificially cheap price — because we don't pay for any of the health or social consequences at the point of consumption — the result is market failure and overconsumption. This is what is fuelling a global obesity pandemic, and even climate change,” Dr Demaio says.
Some solutions to the food crisis are contained in the ground-breaking 2019 report by the EAT-Lancet Commission.
The authors proposed a wide range of measures including reducing consumption of red meat, processed foods and added sugars, a halving of food waste and the introduction of more sustainable food production processes that reduce water and fertiliser use.
More proposals could come from the UN’s summit on food systems next year - a landmark international conference Dr Demaio and others believe could prove pivotal in invigorating reform efforts.
Health experts hope that the summit will help deliver global commitments and a flurry of specific policies to tackle hunger and obesity - or a "Paris accord for food".
“Fundamentally, obesity is just the canary in the proverbial coal mine. The real issues stem from the concept of externality. The idea that you can produce, promote and sell something for a price that doesn't fully internalise the costs to society or our planet is hugely problematic. It also stifles innovation and progress, as it distorts the market forces away from delivering and scaling new, fairer solutions.”
“(Fiscal policies, including food or sugar taxes,) go some way to internalise these indirect costs. It’s about rebalancing the market through truer pricing.”
For its part, the World Health Organization, where Dr Demaio also worked as medical officer for non-communicable conditions and nutrition, recommends sugar taxes to tackle obesity and other health-related problems. The Geneva-based body estimates that a tax on sugary drinks of 1 cent per ounce in the US would save more than USD17 billion in healthcare costs over 10 years.1
And evidence shows the approach works. In the UK, which introduced sugar taxes on drinks containing more than 5g of sugar per 100ml in 2018, sugar content in drinks duly fell 29 per cent – reducing the calorie count by 37.5 billion kilocalories per year.2
Food and the environment: the trade-off
Reform could also bring significant environmental benefits.
Producing food is an energy-intensive activity that draws heavily on the planet’s finite resources, particularly land and water; it is also responsible for a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.
In a recent study, researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC) and other organisations showed that almost half of the food we eat today is produced under conditions that cause severe environmental degradation, such as biodiversity loss, land-system change, freshwater use and nitrogen flows.3
But there are ways to address the trade-off between food security and environmental protection.
The researchers found that the transformation towards more sustainable production and consumption patterns could support as many as 10.2 billion people without causing significant environmental damage.
Specifically, researchers say enhancing water-use efficiency on irrigated and rain-fed farms can triple or quadruple crop yields in low-performing areas, suggesting possible global gains in net food supply of at least 20 per cent.
They also note that reducing food waste and switching away from resource-intensive meat production would increase net food supply as it makes up for any potential decline in output arising from more sustainable farming measures.
The impact for the environment would also be positive. The research estimates the implementation of such measures will lead to a net sequestration of 75 gigatonnes of carbon compared with current agricultural patterns.
This translates to a reduction of atmospheric CO2 concentration by 35 parts per million, offsetting the contribution of land-use change to global warming.
[1] World Health Organization (2017). Taxes on sugary drinks: Why do it?. World Health Organization. https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/260253. License: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-report-shows-further-sugar-reduction-progress-by-food-industry-1
[3] The study is based on the Planetary Boundaries Model, a framework devised by the SRC and other leading scientists that demarcates the thresholds within which human activities should take place. So the more food we produce using current practices, the bigger the breach it causes on these environmental thresholds — which in turn will destabilise the natural system in the long term. For more, see Gerten, D., Heck, V., Jägermeyr, J. et al. Feeding ten billion people is possible within four terrestrial planetary boundaries. Nat Sustain 3, 200–208 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-019-0465-1; see also Rockström, J., W. Steffen, et al. (2009) Planetary boundaries:exploring the safe operating space for humanity. Ecology and Society 14(2): 32. http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss2/art32/
