Welcome to FOOD FIGHT FILES!
What…another newsletter?
Well, yes and no. It’s a space for me to drop links and thoughts on new articles, books, blogs, events and share them. News, unvarnished views, the occasional blog, historical snippets…all revolving around the political and commercial determinants of nutrition and what can be done about them.
For some reason, the health world has been way ahead of the food world when it comes to researching and acting on commercial determinants – the systems, practices and pathways through which commercial actors affect nutrition and health outcomes.
Of course, commercial forces don’t operate in isolation, which is why we need to look at political power at the same time. I wrote about this, years ago. It’s better now, but there’s a still an imbalance in research and action agendas.
The idea for FOOD FIGHT FILES emerged after an intensive couple of years amassing data, research and stories and then writing and re-writing the book ‘Food Fight: From Plunder and Profit to People and Planet’.
So much material…I had to develop a whole new architecture, digital and physical, to capture it. (who said: ‘the more you look, the more you find’?) Teetering stacks of books and papers were built for me to stub my toe on. A lot of it was drawn upon in some way for the book, a lot wasn’t.
A newsletter seemed like a sensible next step. Let’s see…
The last time I ran a newsletter was at the end of the last century when Alan Berg at the World Bank asked me to take over New and Noteworthy in Nutrition (NNN). That was more far-reaching, covering everything and anything in the world of ‘international nutrition.’ This one will be narrower in scope and a lot more opinionated.
Future posts will be blogs on key issues, historical snippets along with a round-up of highlights from books, papers, events, news items. But for now, here’s a compilation of highlights from content I’ve come across in recent weeks – stuff that piqued my interest, that might pique yours too.
Power up
The thread running through this first edition (and indeed, the newsletter itself) is power. The different types of power – structural, instrumental, discursive – the way it’s used (or not) to shape global food systems and governance, and what this means for food, nutrition and health equity.
Two great new papers look upstream at who holds commercial and political power:
In Food Security, Amber van den Akker and colleagues map the network of actors involved in 30 global food system multistakeholder initiatives (MSIs). What emerges is a disturbing spaghetti tangle of a network dominated by powerful commercial actors that looks like this:
The problem is the simple fact that the core interests of the most powerful, most connected of these organisations conflict with the stated purpose of the MSI. Most are based in high-income countries which unsurprisingly happen to host their most powerful transnational corporate members. Communities experiencing food insecurity and injustice and civil society organisations are on the networks’ fringes or nowhere to be seen.
How can such MSIs truly change (transform) a status quo that they depend upon? Do they challenge or even question existing power structures in the global food system? Or further embed and normalize them?
In the second paper, Ben Wood and colleagues investigate a small number of very large asset managers (financial intermediaries that invest capital on behalf of other investors) who are increasingly dominating global food system governance and outcomes. The Big Three are BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street. The authors propose a conceptual framework of pathways and mechanisms through which asset managers influence health and equity. Measures to challenge ‘asset manager capitalism’ are imperative, they argue, to tackle commercial determinants of ill health and inequity, including public ownership of companies and assets in essential sectors.
Power down
Looking downstream, where the food system meets people, we see a very different picture of power.
The Institute of Development Studies (IDS) have just launched the Living Off-Grid Food and Infrastructure Collaboration (LOGIC) microsite. It’s a real asset – highlighting stories from five cities in India, Sri Lanka, Ghana, Zimbabwe and South Africa. Check this blog by Nick Nisbett and this animation of Raveen’s story.
Staying in Sri Lanka, the Colombo Urban Lab and IDS sought to understand how communities in two areas of Colombo experience their food environment. They mapped and interviewed food vendors and households and ran consultations and participatory photography workshops using the photovoice methodology. Check the results here, especially the innovative way they’re presented.
Next up, a paper by Corinna Hawkes et al that shines a light on people’s realities, the way they determine what they can and cannot do, how they engage with policies and interventions. They propose a tool that brings together 12 key material, economic and psychosocial realities.
Power shift
Packed full of insight and ideas, a recent Lancet commentary by Madhu Pai, Shashika Bandara and Catherine Kyobutungi argues for a radical power shift in global health in which leadership by the Global South is matched with allyship by the Global North.
The paper includes this hyper-useful table highlighting examples:
As usual, just as with global health, the same applies to food justice and progress on nutrition.
The authors remind us of the words of American abolitionist, Frederick Douglass:
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
Unfortunately, straight after reading this, I came across this disturbing little anachronism in The Guardian. Forty years ago, when the original Band Aid was launched, I was working in India when I heard ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ on the radio, complete with Bono’s appalling line: ‘Well tonight thank God it’s them, instead of you.’
The perfect response to that came twenty years later. I was at a conference in Kampala in 2004 when Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka elegantly tore strips off the whole aid and development business, scattering in anecdotes of his fraught childhood in Nigeria, fighting his best friend over yams, while eviscerating the ‘Feed the World’ carousel of self-serving benevolence. Soyinka made an impassioned call for self-reliance from western hand-outs, and from ‘development’ imposed from outside by international agencies. He spoke of the power of local culture, local knowledge and the arts, while taking a big swipe at tired colonial clichés:
We have a choice…either to create our own cultural incentives that motivate productivity and lead to self-reliance or await the handouts from the charity of the world. We must remember, however, that there is a condiment that must be swallowed with the food of charity: a chastening ingredient that is known as ‘pride.’ The choice is therefore no choice at all. We owe it to the future that those same fly-infested mouths of want that presently occupy the gallery of a failed past are filled with the self-empowerment that will launch a new chant from the Sahel to the Cape: “We Make Our World.”
The disruption nexus
One of the biggest clichés in the food systems world is the word ‘transformation.’ Not a conference goes by without it being scattered throughout titles and conclusions. Many of its advocates don’t really want transformation, but they want to be seen as ‘game-changers’, on the right side of history.
Which is why it was so refreshing to read this essay by Roman Krznaric.
Real transformative change, he argues, requires three mutually-reinforcing ingredients - a disruptive social movement that amplifies a simmering crisis that bring new ideas for change into focus. Like the example he uses (the climate/ecological crisis), the global nutrition crisis is a slow-burn, attritional problem, which makes radical change harder to trigger and sustain.
I’m a rational agnostic/emotional optimist and I may be wrong…but I think we’re beginning to see things change. The impetus is coming from the bottom left-hand corner of the triangle. Civil society groups, citizens, researchers, advocates, activists are generating traction in media and policy discourse.
Big Food will continue to deny, dispute, distort, distract, duck and delay change, but there seems to be more oxygen now. The public are increasingly fed up with governments who fail to step up and put the guardrails in place. Regardless of industry spin, this is ultimately about equity and affordable, healthy diets for all. Krznaric’s concluding thought about being a 'believer in radical hope' brings to mind this clip of Nick Cave describing hope as the warrior emotion that lays waste to cynicism.
See you soon!