MILK and cookies, macaroni and cheese, fish and chips. Some foods seem to match perfectly together to the point where one can’t go without the other. Food and health, while maybe not as catchy, should be viewed in the same light. Without good food, it is hard to maintain good health; without good food-growing practices, it is difficult to maintain a healthy planet.
It is hard to believe that with all the advancements in agriculture and the food industry today, many people around the world still do not have enough to eat. This is a tragedy. There is more than enough food produced to feed everyone, yet, according to the United Nations’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), more than 800 million people suffer from hunger and more than two billion from micronutrient deficiencies.
This will only get worse as the world population is expected to reach over nine billion by 2050. Conflict, and with it the displacement and migration of people, further compounds the food security and nutrition equation. This year, a number of crises has made millions worldwide severely food insecure.
On the flip side, there are many people, across the globe, going to bed too full: an estimated 40 per cent of adults and millions of children worldwide are overweight.
We are witnessing an overconsumption of food often coupled with a lower nutritional quality. This is having a major impact on obesity, heart disease and other issues, and is no doubt adding to the looming health crisis. Obesity tends to affect poorer populations more, suggesting that the issue is not only the availability of food, but the type of food available.
We are also losing many of the traditional diets in the world in favour of less sustainable diets. Developing countries are moving away from traditional diets high in cereal, vegetables and fibre to more Western-styled diets that are high in sugar, fat and animal-source food. This is not only bad for human health, but potentially catastrophic for the environment.
A look at livestock alone and its contribution to climate change demonstrates this point. According to the FAO, the sector emits seven gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent every year, representing around 14 per cent of all human-induced emissions. Planetary boundaries may well be surpassed if current trends continue. Also, it takes 10 times more water and 20 times more energy to produce 1kg of wheat as it does to produce the same weight of beef, and at present, three quarters of the world’s wheat is grown to feed livestock.
And, while certain agricultural practices contribute to climate change, climate change is also likely to have a serious impact on food security. Climate models indicate that while rising temperatures may have a beneficial effect on crops in temperate areas, tropical areas may experience a significant reduction in crop productivity in the long term.
Equally serious will be the impact of climate change on the nutritional content of key crops, which could put hundreds of millions of people at risk of vitamin deficiencies. Studies show that higher CO2 levels significantly reduce the levels of the essential nutrients iron and zinc, as well as protein, in such staple crops as wheat, rice, maize and soybean.
While these crops are relatively low in iron and zinc compared with meat, in poorer societies where meat is not consumed as much as in wealthier nations, they remain a major source of the nutrients needed for children to grow and to develop.
And then, there is the waste. Roughly one-third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year — approximately 1.3 billion tonnes — gets lost or wasted, with fruits and vegetables having the highest wastage rates of any food, says FAO. This waste amounts to roughly US$680 billion (RM2.9 trillion) in industrialised countries and US$310 billion in developing countries. If we are going to meet Goal 12 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals — to reduce global food waste by half by 2030 — much more needs to be done.
We have to acknowledge the multiple problems that exist within our food systems and that nutritional problems are escalating. It is becoming increasingly clear that food systems, and diets, are not sustainable. What is urgently needed is a holistic approach to address food and health, as well as sustainability along the entire food chain. Raising awareness on what a healthy diet means is also key.
The newly-established Rockefeller Foundation Economic Council on Planetary Health at the Oxford Martin School will continue to find solutions to health risks posed by poor stewardship of the planet. In an era of global environmental change, the food-health connection must be made central to any such investigation.
Over the next 18 months, the economic council — made up of world leaders from government, international organisations, civil society, business, finance and academia — will bridge knowledge gaps on the links between economic development, natural systems and human health to compel collaboration across disciplines and coordinated action to address the complex challenges of the 21st century — a century where the food and health connection will need to be viewed inseparably, like an order of fish and chips. IPS
Dr Doaa Abdel-Motaal is the Executive Director of The Rockefeller Foundation Economic Council on Planetary Health at the Oxford Martin School.
