Thank you for providing the opportunity to register my comments and observations on the HLPE Steering Committee Issues Note on Nutrition and Food Systems.
In the draft note's opening comments there are a few ideas presented that I would like to quote as they shape the treatment of the ten points to consider. These are:
"There is a diversity of food systems and growing evidence of the health and nutrition implications of different food systems."
"The overarching issue in this report shall be to assess the influence of various types of food systems on diets, nutrition and health."
"It shall consider food chains from farm to fork and all the sustainability challenges of food systems (in the economic, social and environmental dimensions) and how they relate to nutrition."
"This calls for a report grounded on a multidisciplinary approach."
"Malnutrition is a global issue. The nutrition focus shall include malnutrition in all its forms, including under nutrition, over nutrition and micro nutrient deficiencies."
"The report shall examine the multidimensionality of food systems and nutrition and the root causes of malnutrition."
It would help to illustrate what is meant by a 'food system' and where the 'diversity' in food systems comes from. There are - as many previous CFS-HLPE consultations have shown - many ways in which to consider what agro-ecological systems and cultivation ideologies are. For this Issues Note, is 'food system' synonymous with an agro-ecological system, or with the retailing of primary crop produce, or with the technology, finance and marketing apparatus that deals with the transformed and retailed end product? I prefer to consider not 'food system' but primary crop that emerges from an agro-ecological approach, which is then stored as and used as food. This is an important distinction to make, because it maintains the connection between 'food' and agro-ecological cultivation, and it is on the basis of that connection we can consider what we mean by nutrition, but also by the provision of calories and the culturally-sound dietary selection - all these are to be taken together and it will not help engender a deeper understanding of the influencing factors if one (nutrition) is removed and treated separately.
Likewise, what is it that influences crop choices, the kind of agriculture practiced, and the notions of sustainability about any food provisioning system that rests upon these crop and cultivation choices? I'd like to point out that the FAO-OECD Agricultural Outlook projections for 2023 expect that 12% of maize and other coarse grains will go to biofuel production, 14% of global vegetable oils will be used to produce biodiesel, and 28% of sugar will go towards producing transportation fuels. This represents some of the contradictions that immediately confront any serious and committed discussion of what is meant by 'food system', dietary adequacy, dietary choice, degree to which primary crop is retained as food (that is, before entering the processing and then retail chains). There are aspects in such consideration that must dwell on how such use of maize, vegetable oil and sugar (to take examples pertaining to fuels) diverts land and water from their optimal use in producing healthier food. It also helps describe how substitution of one kind of energy (fossil fuel) with another kind (cultivated biomass) represents part of the current coalition of interests around 'green economy' and 'low carbon development' which have a very significant impact on food systems and nutrition.
The attempts to regulate commodities markets have been derailed by strong financial industry lobbying (because of the financialisation of food and other commodities, and the manner in which these are tied to the capital and speculative finance markets). As a result, financial speculators (who take form as a bewildering variety of funds) treat food commodities as an 'asset class'. In this way, the pernicious link between food, fuel, and financial markets adds volatility to real food markets even if overall food price indices remain relatively low. The Issue Note therefore must accurately characterise current conditions concerning: (a) what is considered agriculture and food policy, (b) how the food industry in fact functions, (c) how farmers' crop choices are influenced, (d) the ways in which consumers' food purchase choices are shaped, (e) the prices (to industry, government, household and producer) at which such choices are made out to be economically 'viable', and (f) the environmental, ecological, cultural and social costs that are incurred with these choices.
This is necessary as today a small number of increasingly powerful corporations dominate global markets and also what is considered the public policy space concerning agriculture and food. Despite having brought rapid growth in production of a few staple commodities, hunger and malnutrition persist, as do environmentally unsustainable production practices. Overall, at the inter-governmental level as well as at the national level, policy-makers have failed to confront the new realities of the dangerous interdependence of food, fuel, and financial markets in the face of climate change. The token changes mentioned so far have been inadequate to produce the kinds of structural reforms in global and national policies that are required to take us on a different path toward a different result. This different result and practice includes ensuring that farmers have access to decent land, public research and extension, credit, marketing support, measures to stabilise prices at remunerative levels, and import protection where necessary. These are not new ideas, and have been put forth since the early 20th century in most countries which began to follow (or were advised to by multi-lateral development banks) industrial agricultural methods.
These are also countries in which food markets (physical, rural, urban, wholesale) experience both shortages and price volatility because they have been persuaded (or coerced) into abandoning the practice of maintaining public food reserves that help deal with emergencies and help dampen commodities markets-induced price volatility. During the two decades of the International Monetary Fund- (IMF) directed structural adjustment programmes until 2008-09, when the food price rise struck all over the world, reserves like these had been widely condemned by the cabal of macro-economic planners who advise governments as inefficient, market-distorting government interventions. Such calumny continues, but many governments have taken steps to establish food reserves as an important measure with which to stave off price volatility in local markets caused by the transferring of international food commodity prices and the volatility that accompanies them every so often as the financialisation mania takes a new turn for the dangerous.
To make clear the fundamental connection between what the Issue Note considers as food systems and their sustainability, and the perversities of macro-economics that prevail today, consider the public stock-holding programme of India. It is linked to the right to food through a programme that pays farmers a guaranteed (minimum support) price slightly higher than market prices for their crops and distribute it to the needy at subsidised rates (for cereals, pulses and sugar). When fully implemented, the programme can reach more than two-thirds of India's enormous population, a large number of whom experience dietary deficiencies and inadequacies. Yet the National Food Security Programme of the government of India has been singled out as a sticking point for the World Trade Organization (WTO) which has the potential of stalling the WTO altogether, and which therefore must be 'reformed' as per the dictates of a grouping which includes the USA, EU and several of their allies. That these 'reforms' rest upon archaic norms agreed two decades ago and which unabashedly favour the USA, EU and OECD are considered beyond the scope of negotiation.
In 2011 the then U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter, identified the underlying problem when he accepted his second three-year mandate in 2011: "Too much attention has been paid to addressing the mismatch between supply and demand on the international markets - as if global hunger were the result of physical scarcity at the aggregate level - while comparatively too little attention has been paid both to the imbalances of power in the food systems and to the failure to support the ability of small-scale farmers to feed themselves, their families, and their communities." My advice to the HLPE is to not treat nutrition separately. Until recently, the loudest alarm raised concerning food has been that not enough of it is grown to remove global hunger, when in fact for years inter-governmental and state data have showed that collectively, countries grow enough to feed very much more than the current population (after providing for cattle, poultry and farm and draught animals). In the same manner, I find, the superficial but high-volume argumentation about nutrition is taking shape in order to divorce it from agro-ecological cultivation, culturally and community appropriate crop and dietary choices, from the retaining of primary crop as food (less to the processing and retailing industries, none to the fuel industry). It is taking shape in order to use the goal - that seemed to become available under the 'global hunger' alarm - of raising production through the expansion of industrial high-input monoculture farming assisted by bio-technologies and synthetic biologies.
Yours sincerely,
Rahul Goswami
Rahul Goswami