Member profile
Dr. Andhressa Fagundes
Organization:
Universidade Federal de Sergipe
Country:
Brazil
Field(s) of expertise:
I am working on:
Food Security and Nutrition.
Dr. Andhressa Fagundes
Dear FSN-Forum colleagues,
On behalf of the Thematic Group Food and Nutrition in Collective Health (GT- ANSC), from Brazilian Association of Collective Health (ABRASCOj), we are pleased to share our opinions and ideas about the Voluntary Guidelines on Food Systems and Nutrition and to submit our feedback.
Congratulations for the initiative.
Sincerely,
GT – ANSC/ ABRASCO - Brazil
***
1. Does Chapter 1 adequately reflect the current situation of malnutrition and its related causes and impacts, particularly in line with the goals and targets of the 2030 Agenda? What are the underlying problems that currently hinder food systems to deliver healthy diets?
COMMENTS:
The concept of healthy eating currently adopted in the document has already proved insufficient to meet the challenges of ensuring healthy eating for people. Focusing solely on the nutritional composition of diets does not foresee the immense challenges and the dimensions that condition people and societies to achieve this ideal composition. Therefore, it must be expanded to incorporate the aspects that determine and/or impact not only the individual health but also the economic, social and environmental sustainability of the food systems. An example of what we are proposing is the concept adopted in the "Dietary Guidelines for the Brazilian population":
“Adequate and healthy diet is a basic human right. This right implies ensuring permanent and regular access, in a socially fair manner, to food and ways of eating that satisfy the social and biological requirements of everybody. It also takes into account special dietary needs, and the needs to be culturally appropriate, and allow for differences in gender, race, and ethnicity. An adequate and healthy diet should be accessible both physically and financially, and harmonious in quantity and quality, meeting the needs of variety, balance, moderation, and pleasure. Furthermore, it should derive from sustainable practices of production and distribution.” (Brazil, 2014[1]).
It is necessary to clarify the unsustainability of the hegemonic food systems. We highlight here some of its characteristics of this unsustainability:
- They are structured based on non-applicable assumptions (e.g., a stable climate, abundant water, cheap energy);
- They are based on large estates, monoculture, and large-scale production;
- They widely use non-food/natural components (pesticides, antibiotics, hormones, additives) harmful to the health of people and the planet;
- They degrade ecosystems due to their methods of producing, storing, transporting and marketing food;
- They are inefficient at various stages of the production process, generating waste and impacting prices;
- They use technologies that threaten food sovereignty and biodiversity (e.g., genetic modification, biofortification);
- They induce, through various mechanisms, the shift of consumption from fresh and minimally processed foods to processed and ultra-processed foods;
- They threaten food culture and heritage;
- They concentrate stages of the food chain in large transnational corporations (e.g., input and seed industries, food industries, large retail chains) that have high political and economic power and act to block public policies that go against their interests. Moreover, to enable measures that favor their business;
- They reproduce and deepen the social inequities in access to land, water, energy, and income.
In short, hegemonic systems are based on an income-concentrating model that is highly dependent on large transnational corporations, which favors the production of unhealthy food, deepens inequities, and generates critical environmental repercussions. These characteristics impact not only individual and collective health but endanger the democracy and reach of the SDG as a whole, not just the SDG2.
It is also necessary to recognize the relationship between social inequalities and the occurrence of chronic diseases, as well as the decisive influence of hegemonic food systems for the current epidemiological scenario of increasing obesity and other chronic diseases. One publication that can help substantiate this argument is a report entitled "The Global Syndemic of Obesity, Undernutrition, and Climate Change: The Lancet Commission Report" by Boyd Swinburn and colleagues (Lancet, 2019[2]).
Similarly, another report also released by The Lancet brings resembling evidence and proposals indicating the urgency of incorporating a broader view of what is "healthy eating" and the strategies to make it viable and accessible to people.
References:
Swinburn, B. et al. The Global Syndemic of Obesity, Undernutrition, and Climate Change: The Lancet Commission Report"
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)32822-8/fulltext?utm_campaign=tlobesity19&utm_content=83639620&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&hss_channel=tw-27013292#articleInformation
Willett, W.; Rockström, J.; Loken, B.; Springmann, M.; Lang, T.; Vermeulen, S. et al. Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems. The Lancet Commission, v. 393, n. 10170, p. 447-492, January 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ S0140-6736(18)31788-4.
2. What should be the guiding principles to promote sustainable food systems that improve nutrition and enable healthy diets? What are your comments about the principles outlined in Chapter 2? Are they the most appropriate for your national/regional contexts?
COMMENTS:
Principle (f), "Realization of the human right to adequate food" should be the first to be cited and should be recognized as the structuring axis of all guidelines. In this sense, the guidelines must assume the inseparability of human rights, since rights such as land and territory are essential for the sustainability of food systems.
Principle (d), "gender equality and women's empowerment", should be addressed not only within the limits of women's role in food systems but in the promotion and protection of the rights to gender equality as a whole for the free and full realization of women, and, therefore, to reduce social injustice.
The following should also be included as guidelines principles:
- Equality and non-discrimination;
- The rights of indigenous peoples and traditional communities to land, territory and free exercise of their livelihoods;
- Recognize that regenerative and traditional practices are services provided by indigenous peoples and traditional communities to protect the planet and humanity;
- Protection and promotion of regenerative and sustainable production models;
- Protection of the heritage and food culture of different peoples and communities;
- Protection and health promotion of all workers involved in all stages of the food system;
- Democratic governance, representative of the right holders, transparent and free of conflicts of interest.
3. In consideration of the policy areas identified in Chapter 3 and the enabling factors suggested in paragraph 41 of the Zero Draft, what policy entry points should be covered in Chapter 3, taking into account the need to foster policy coherence and address policy fragmentation?
COMMENTS:
Considering the sharing of macro determinants of food systems and food and nutrition, we emphasize that for the Voluntary Guidelines to have the potential for effectiveness in addressing the unsustainability of food systems and addressing all forms of malnutrition, public policies need to move forward taking back the regulatory role of Member States (promoting, protecting nutrition and sustainable food systems) so that food is a public good. The inclusion of protection and promotion of socio-biodiversity is also suggested.
4. Can you provide specific examples of new policies, interventions, initiatives, alliances and institutional arrangements which should be considered, as well as challenges, constraints, and trade-offs relevant to the three constituent elements of food systems presented in Chapter 3? In your view, what would the "ideal" food system look like, and what targets/metrics can help guide policy-making?
COMMENTS:
- Taxation to reduce the consumption of unhealthy products;
- Incentives to expand financial access to healthy food (exemption);
- Public policies to expand access to healthy food. Food supply system to promote physical and financial access to healthy foods (short circuits, growers' markets, fairs, protection, and promotion of small businesses). Generating a direct action to induce retail trade with healthy products in regions of lower purchasing power, to reduce deserts and food swamps;
- Regulation of all practices of commercial promotion of unhealthy products mainly aimed at children (advertising, TV, internet, event financing, marketing and merchandising in public equipment in general and in schools in particular)
- Food labeling with front warning;
- Update of health claims regulation rules on food labels;
- Prohibition of marketing and advertising of unhealthy products in government administered facilities in general, and in schools in particular;
- Inclusion in the school curriculum of an approach of the multiple determinants of food and nutrition to promote autonomy, valorization of self-care and development of skills;
- Approach to food and nutrition education beyond the biological dimension to generate autonomy, critical capacity, and skills. Following the concept and principles adopted in Brazil (BRASIL, 2012):
"Food and Nutrition Education, in the context of the realization of the Human Right to Adequate Food and the guarantee of Food and Nutrition Security, is a continuous and permanent, intersectoral and multi-professional field of knowledge and practice that aims to promote the independent and voluntary practice of habits. healthy eating”.
- Food and Nutrition Education should be governed by the principles:
Reference:
Brasil. Marco de Referência de Educação Alimentar e Nutricional para as Políticas Públicas, 2012. http://www.cfn.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/marco_EAN.pdf
5. How would these Voluntary Guidelines be most useful for different stakeholders, especially at national and regional levels, once endorsed by CFS?
COMMENTS:
In both central and peripheral countries, contemporary food systems respond to the private logic of capital, which operates globally. As a result, there is a homogenization in dietary patterns, and industry determine what and how populations should eat. Dominated by large transnational corporations, food systems, in their present configuration, are unsustainable in terms of promoting food and nutrition security, either nationally or regionally.
In addition to the environmental impact, which is destructive to large-scale agricultural production based on the intensive use of transgenic seeds and pesticides, there has been a marked change in global food systems in recent decades, with the replacement of meals based on with food and culinary ingredients for ready meals, made up of ultra-processed foods, which significantly affects the health and nutrition of populations. From this perspective, there are no sustainable food systems, since they are not subordinated to human needs, but the needs of capital.
On the other hand, thinking about public policy actions related to food and nutrition, presupposes an understanding that states operate in line with the global logic of the commodity-producing system, in its different phases of accumulation. This will lead to more or less investment in national policies that will reduce social inequalities and different forms of malnutrition and promote the development of sustainable food systems.
Thus, the discussion here does not end with the finding of common sense, according to which it is a matter of the political will of rulers to end social inequalities since they are a constitutive element of the successive crises of capital. Thus, to tackle this issue at its root, it is necessary to broaden the discussion to other global forums that focus on the direction that world economic policies are taking and their societal consequences. Depending on the global pressure, caused by broader movements, it will be possible to envisage public policies that favor state regulation of food systems, towards the construction of sustainable systems capable of producing healthy food. Under these assumptions, it is necessary to consider the correlation of forces that is capable of forcing national states to act more closely to human needs, producing movements of state regulation regarding agricultural and industrial food production.
References:
Machado PP, Oliveira NRF, Mendes AN. O indigesto sistema do alimento mercadoria. Saúde Soc. São Paulo, v.25, n.2, p.505-515, 2016 http://www.scielo.br/pdf/sausoc/v25n2/1984-0470-sausoc-25-02-00505.pdf
Monteiro CA et al. Ultra-processed products are becoming dominant in the global food system. Obesity Reviews, Londres, v. 14, n. 2, p. 21-28, 2013.
MONTEIRO, G.; FARINA, EMMQ; NUNES, R. Food-retail development and the myth of everyday low prices: the case of Brazil. Development Policy Review, London, v. 30, n. Jan 2012, p. 49-66, 2012. Disponível em: < http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-7679.2012.00559.x/pdf >.
Pochmann M. Estado e capitalismo no Brasil: a inflexão atual no padrão das políticas públicas do ciclo político da nova república. Educ. Soc., Campinas, v. 38, nº. 139, p.309-330, abr.-jun., 2017. http://www.scielo.br/pdf/es/v38n139/1678-4626-es-38-139-00309.pdf.
[1] http://bvsms.saude.gov.br/bvs/publicacoes/dietary_guidelines_brazilian_population.pdf
[2]https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)3282…