Food Systems Worsen Diets, Health

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Jan 21 2025 (IPS) - Corporate-dominated food systems are responsible for widespread but still spreading malnutrition and ill health. Poor diets worsen non-communicable diseases (NCDs), now costing over eight trillion dollars yearly!

Unhealthy food systems

A recent UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) study of 156 countries found that such food systems account for unsafe food and diet-related NCDs.

FAO estimates related ‘hidden costs’ at about $12 trillion annually, with 70% ($8.1 trillion) due to NCDs such as heart disease, strokes and diabetes. Such costs significantly exceed these food systems’ environmental and social costs.

FAO’s annual State of Food and Agriculture 2024 (SOFA) investigated hidden costs worldwide. These were primarily health-related, followed by environmental degradation, mainly in more ‘industrialised’ agri-food systems in upper-middle and high-income countries.

SOFA 2024 builds on the 2023 SOFA. The two-year study uses true cost accounting to estimate significant costs and benefits of food production, distribution and consumption.

The study estimates “hidden costs and benefits”, including those not reflected by market prices. The latest SOFA updates cost estimates, classifies them by agrifood system, and proposes solutions.

The report identifies 13 dietary risks with health implications, with significant differences among various food systems. Inadequate consumption of whole grains (the leading dietary risk in most food systems), fruits, and vegetables is the worst, while excessive sodium and meat consumption cause significant health risks.

Hidden costs

SOFA 2024 identifies historical transitions from traditional to industrial agrifood systems, their outcomes, and hidden costs. It distinguishes six food systems worldwide – traditional, expanding, diversifying, formalising, industrial, and protracted crisis – and links each to hidden costs.

This approach enables a better understanding of each system’s unique features and the design of more appropriate policies and interventions.

However, inadequate fruit and vegetable intake is the main concern during protracted crises – e.g., prolonged conflicts, instability, and widespread food insecurity – and in traditional systems with low productivity, limited technology adoption, and shorter value chains.

Excessive sodium consumption is another significant health concern, rising as food “systems evolve from traditional to formalising, peaking in the latter and then decreasing in industrial systems”.

Meanwhile, processed and red meat intake rises with the shift from traditional to industrial systems. Meat is one of industrial food systems’ top three dietary risk factors. Adverse environmental impacts of unsustainable agronomic practices contribute significantly to hidden costs.

Such costs – due to greenhouse gas emissions, nitrogen runoffs, land-use changes, and water pollution – rise with diversifying food systems. Rapid growth typically involves changing food production and consumption, costing $720 billion more yearly.

Formalising and industrial food systems also incur significant environmental costs. However, countries facing protracted crises face the highest environmental costs, equivalent to a fifth of their output.

Social costs, including poverty and undernourishment, are most significant in traditional food systems and more vulnerable to protracted crises, incurring around 8% and 18% of GDP, respectively.

Such high social costs emphasise the urgent need for integrated efforts to improve livelihoods and well-being, reflecting stakeholder priorities and sensitivity to local circumstances.

Collective action

SOFA 2024 seeks to promote “more sustainable, resilient, inclusive, and efficient” food systems. It uses true cost accounting to identify hidden costs, going well beyond traditional economic measures such as the gross domestic product (GDP).

Using realistic and pragmatic approaches, policymakers make better-informed decisions to enhance food systems’ social contributions. More comprehensive approaches should acknowledge the crucial contributions of food systems to food security, nutrition, biodiversity, and culture.

Such transformations require transcending conceptual divides, ensuring health, agricultural, and environmental policy coherence, and fairly sharing costs and benefits among all stakeholders.

The report stresses that this requires collective action involving diverse stakeholders, which is difficult to achieve. Such stakeholders include consumers, primary producers, agribusinesses, governments, financial institutions, and international organisations.

Addressing hidden costs affects various stakeholders differently. Appropriate frameworks, supportive policies, and regulations ease implementation and minimise disruption by adopting sustainable practices early and protecting the vulnerable.

Recommendations

Recognising food systems’ adverse consequences for diets and health, the report makes several key recommendations quite different from those of the Davos World Economic Forum-compromised 2021 UN Food Systems Summit. It urges:

• incentivising the promotion of advancing sustainable food supply chain practices and balancing among food system stakeholders.

• promoting healthy diets by making nutritious food more affordable and accessible, reducing adverse health consequences and costs.

• using labelling, certification, standards, and due diligence to reduce greenhouse gas and nitrogen emissions, harmful land-use changes, and biodiversity loss.

• empowering society with comprehensive, clear, accessible, and actionable food and nutrition education and information about food choices’ health, environmental, and social impacts.

• using collective procurement’s significant purchasing power and influence to improve food supplies and the environment.

• ensuring inclusive rural transformations while reducing hidden health, environmental and social costs.

• strengthening civil society and governance to enable and accelerate sustainable and fair food system innovations and enhance social well-being, especially for vulnerable households.

Available here online: Food Systems Worsen Diets, Health

Financing for Development Priorities Today

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Jan 7 2025 (IPS) - The forthcoming fourth United Nations Financing for Development conference must address developing countries’ major financial challenges. Recent setbacks to sustainable development and climate action make FfD4 all the more critical.

FfD4

The FfD4 conference, months away, will mainly be due to efforts led by the G77, the caucus of developing countries in the UN system. The G77 started with 77 UN member states and has since expanded to over 130.

The 1944 Bretton Woods conference outcome was primarily a compromise between the US and the UK. In 1971, when its Bretton Woods obligations threatened to undermine its privileges, President Richard Nixon refused to honour the US pledge to deliver an ounce of gold for US$35.

Over two decades later, President Bill Clinton promised a new international financial architecture. It rejected Professor Robert Triffin’s characterisation of international monetary arrangements after the early 1970s as an incoherent ‘non-system’.

Foreign aid

Several issues are emerging as G77 priorities for FfD4. In 1970, wealthy nations at the UN agreed to provide 0.7% of their national income annually as official development assistance (ODA).

This was much lower than the 2% initially proposed by the World Council of Churches and others. Only 0.3% has been delivered in recent years, or less than half the promise.

Most ODA conditions reflect the priorities of donors, not recipient countries. New aid definitions, conditions, and practices undermine ‘aid effectiveness’, reducing what developing nations receive.

Despite breaking its ODA promises, the new European Parliament voted overwhelmingly to contribute 0.25% of national income to Ukraine. By early December 2024, Europe had provided well over half the USD260 billion in aid to Ukraine!

Some European nations now insist that only mitigation qualifies as climate finance. Although most developing countries are tropical and struggling to cope with planetary heating, little assistance is available for adaptation.

Debt

More recently, developing countries’ new debt has been more commercial and conditional but less concessional. With the transition to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, the World Bank encouraged much more commercial borrowing with its new slogan, ‘from billions to trillions’.

Following the 2008 global financial crisis, Western countries adopted unconventional monetary policies, eschewing fiscal efforts. Quantitative easing enabled much more borrowing, which grew until 2022.

However, most Western governments did not borrow much. Some private interests borrowed heavily, often for unproductive purposes, with some using cheap funds to finance shareholder buyouts to get more wealth.

Meanwhile, many developing countries went on borrowing binges as creditors pushed debt in developing countries in various ways. Rapidly mounting government debt would soon become problematic.

From early 2022 until mid-2024, interest rates rose sharply, ostensibly to counter inflation. The US Fed and European Central Bank raised interest rates in concert, triggering massive capital outflows from developing countries with the poorest worst affected.

Taxation

The Global South has long wanted the UN to lead negotiations on international taxation arrangements to provide more financial resources for development. However, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) rich nations’ club has long undermined developing countries’ interests.

The OECD achieved this by misleading finance ministries in developing countries. It bypassed foreign ministries that had long worked well together on contentious Global South issues. With the OECD making up new rules for the world, developing country finance ministries signed on to a biased tax proposal on which they were nominally consulted.

At the FfD3 conference in mid-2015, the OECD blocked Global South efforts to advance international tax cooperation. An independent international commission proposed a minimum international corporate income tax rate of 25%.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen counter-proposed a 21% rate, the US minimum rate. However, at the G7 meeting he was hosting, Boris Johnson pushed this down to 15% while adding exemptions, reducing likely revenue.

Instead of distributing revenue as with a corporate income tax on profits from production, the OECD proposed revenue sharing according to consumption spending, much like a sales tax.

Poor countries would receive little as their population can afford to spend much less, even if they produce much at low wages. Rather than progressively redistribute, OECD international corporate income tax revenue distribution would be regressive.

Dollar

The US dollar remains the world’s principal currency for international transactions. US Treasury bond sales enable this, subsidising the world’s largest economy. Trump recently threatened the BRICS and others considering de-dollarization.

The leading BRICS proponents of de-dollarisation, Brazil and South Africa, have failed to persuade the other BRICS to de-dollarize. Instead, China’s central bank has issued dollar-denominated bonds for Saudi Arabia.

Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) should be issued regularly to augment discretionary IMF financial resources. This can be done without Congressional approval, as happened after the 2008 global financial crisis and the COVID-19 outbreak.

Such resources can be committed to the SDGs and climate finance.

But this cannot happen without collective action by the Global South seriously mobilising behind pacifist, developmental non-alignment. Inclusive and sustainable development is impossible in a world at war.

Available online here: Financing for Development Priorities Today

New Geopolitics Worse for Global South

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Dec 17 2024 (IPS) - The new geopolitics after the first Cold War undermines peace, sustainability, and human development. Hegemonic priorities continue to threaten humanity’s well-being and prospects for progress.

End of first Cold War

The end of the first Cold War has been interpreted in various ways, most commonly as a US triumph. Francis Fukuyama famously proclaimed the ‘end of history’ with the victory of capitalism and liberal democracy.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and allied regimes, the US seemed unchallenged and unchallengeable in the new ‘unipolar’ world. The influential US journal Foreign Affairs termed ensuing US foreign policy ‘sovereigntist’.

But the new order also triggered fresh discontent. Caricaturing cultural differences, Samuel Huntington blamed a ‘clash of civilisations’. His contrived cultural categories serve a new ‘divide-and-rule’ strategy.

Today’s geopolitics often associates geographic and cultural differences with supposed ideological, systemic and other political divides. Such purported fault lines have also fed ‘identity politics’.

The new Cold War is hot and bloody in parts of the world, sometimes spreading quickly. As bellicosity is increasingly normalised, hostilities have grown dangerously.

Economic liberalisation, including globalisation, has been unevenly reversed since the turn of the century. Meanwhile, financialization has undermined the real economy, especially industry.

The G20 finance ministers, representing the world’s twenty largest economies, including several from the Global South, began meeting after the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

The G20 began meeting at the heads of government level following the 2008 global financial crisis, which was seen as a G7 failure. However, the G20’s relevance has declined again as the North reasserted G7 centrality with the new Cold War.

NATO rules

The ostensible raison d’être of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has gone with the end of the first Cold War and the Soviet Union.

The faces of Western powers have also changed. For example, the G5 grew to become the G7 in 1976. US infatuation with the post-Soviet Russia of Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin even brought it into the G8 for some years!

Following the illegal US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the sovereigntist Wolfowitz doctrine of 2007 redefined its foreign policy priorities to strengthen NATO and start a new Cold War. NATO mobilisation of Europe – behind the US against

Russia – now supports Israel targeting China, Iran and others.

Violating the UN Charter, the 2022 Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine united and strengthened NATO and Europe behind the US. Despite earlier tensions across the north Atlantic, Europe rallied behind Biden against Russia despite its high costs.

International law has also not stopped NATO expansion east to the Russian border. The US unilaterally defines new international norms, often ignoring others, even allies. But Trump’s re-election has raised ‘centrist’ European apprehensions.

Developing countries were often forced to take sides in the first Cold War, ostensibly waged on political and ideological grounds. With mixed economies now ubiquitous, the new Cold War is certainly not over capitalism.

Instead, rivalrous capitalist variants shape the new geoeconomics as state variations underlie geopolitics. Authoritarianism, communist parties and other liberal dirty words are often invoked for effect.

New Europe

Despite her controversial track record during her first term as the European Commission (EC) president, Ursula von der Leyen is now more powerful and belligerent in her second term.

She quickly replaced Joseph Borrell, her previous EC Vice President and High Representative in charge of international relations. Borrell described Europe as a garden that the Global South, the surrounding jungle, wants to invade.

For Borrell, Europe cannot wait for the jungle to invade. Instead, it must pre-emptively attack the jungle to contain the threat. Since the first Cold War, NATO has made more, mainly illegal military interventions, increasingly outside Europe!

The US, UK, German, French and Australian navies are now in the South China Sea despite the 1973 ASEAN (Association of South-East Asian Nations) commitment to a ZOPFAN (zone of peace, freedom and neutrality) and no request from any government in the region.

Cold War nostalgia

The first Cold War also saw bloody wars involving alleged ‘proxies’ in southwestern Africa, Central America, and elsewhere. Yet, despite often severe Cold War hostilities, there were also rare instances of cooperation.

In 1979, the Soviet Union challenged the US to eradicate smallpox within a decade. US President Jimmy Carter accepted the challenge. In less than ten years, smallpox was eradicated worldwide, underscoring the benefits of cooperation.

Official development assistance (ODA) currently amounts to around 0.3% of rich countries’ national incomes. This is less than half the 0.7% promised by wealthy nations at the UN in 1970.

The end of the first Cold War led to ODA cuts. Levels now are below those after Thatcher and Reagan were in power in the 1980s. Trump’s views and famed ‘transactional approach’ to international relations are expected to cut aid further.

The economic case against the second Cold War is clear. Instead of devoting more to sustainable development, scarce resources go to military spending and related ‘strategic’ priorities.

Related IPS Articles:

• The Global South in the New Cold War

• South Suffering Due to Powerful Nations’ Policies

• IMF Urges Non-alignment in Second Cold War

• Imperialism, Globalisation and Its Discontents*

• North Ignores ‘Perfect Storm’ in Global South

• Aid for Power in New Cold War

• Weaponizing Free Trade Agreements

Available online here: New Geopolitics Worse for Global South