Dear sirs,
My name is Adolfo Chávez and during 1988-1990 I was Director at the Applied Nutrition Services at FAO. Before for some years, I was President and Secretary of the Nutrition Planners Forum supported by AID. I also had experience planning and advising programs in my own country Mexico.
I believe that the Draft Report: Nutrition and Food Systems does not make enough emphasis in 4 fundamental subjects that have a growing and dominating trend in the less developed countries, at least in Latinamerica and Africa. They are the consequences of the prevalent neoliberal system. As a matter of fact the situation give place to a “neoliberal food consumption pattern”.
1. The increase dominance of supermarkets that are promoting a new way of eating, actually a new food system. They have their own purchasing methods thorough their own associated merchants with big producers. The tendency is to leave outside all small producers. They import when they have advantages and with their control they manage prices. Another problem of the supermarkets is that in their stores it looks as if they were offering thousands of products, but more than half are made of cereal meals (corn, wheat) with different presentations, crackers, breakfast cereals, breads, cakes, pan cakes, meals, etc. with different colors, flavors, packages, etc. Their offer of fresh foods is limited, in amounts and reduced to few species, the ones that have long shelf live.
2. It is expected that the bio-technology and the transgenic progressively will control-regulate the food systems, as their production is more extensive and capitalistic, related with the supermarkets. Unfortunately the predominating transgenic products are the ones that render more profit, not better nutrition. We know that, per-example, there are potatoes and other roots that can be albumin enriched and dozens of other kind of foods with nutritional improvements, but this kind of transgenic are more “technological developments” than actually commercial products.
In this neoliberal context, countries that are based in imports, surely are and will be progressively consuming large amounts of transgenic and many other products of the technological-economical advances. They will be at the central structure of food systems.
3. The junk food consumption, made of meals, sugars and lots of fats of low quality, is growing in incredibly amounts and forms. In Mexico, a poor country just 3 companies, sells 21.7 billion dollars a year. The poor people, on government cash transferences, accepts to spend 16.8% of their income on them, but they don’t know which foods are junk, and that means that for sure they consume much more than the amounts they accept in surveys.
Most of the junk foods do not have proteins, most of them are also very low in micronutrients. They have large amounts of unnecessary fats with additives and contaminated with pesticides, aflatoxins, acrylamide, clembuterol, dioxin, etc. As a group they are a big part of the food basis of chronic malnutrition and most of the chronic non-transmissible syndromes and diseases.
Beer and alcoholic beverages are not mentioned in the report. They have a roll in the food systems. In Mexico only one brewing sells 1.5 billion dollars a year. As least they have to be considered as competition with the purchasing possibilities of families.
Most of the evaluations don´t show the roll of the large commercial chains of junk food producers including foods sold by big companies as Nestlé, Danone and Unilever. One important part, not always considered, are the heavy sells of many products in schools and work places.
4. Another problem that progressively grow without control that affects food systems are the increasing use of synthetics. Some times are total substitutes as chocolate and sugar. Also most of the times are used as flavors and colors of fruits like orange, lemon, berries, etc., all these cause big unemployment on the fields of tropical countries. Any new synthetic leaves hundreds or more of unemployed.
All these 4 problems are growing so strongly that causes a new system, very strong with power to the degree that countries can’t do anything against. It is frequent that they pay low taxes, have influence on the research, etc. They are growing so fast that in few years they will be the entire food system, with actually extraordinary profits, but in countries full of nutrition problems and chronic diseases.
Adolfo Chávez