Human rights: Food for a junky thought ‘The right to food’
HRR 795
[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are it behooves you. This HR Reader is about the trap and about a couple avenues to fight back. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
Ultraprocessed edible products cater to the industrial palate, not the people’s palate (Stuart Gillespie)
1. Are Big Food and Big Soda (not forgetting Big Pharma) unusual industries? No! Their business model functions in an entirely ruthless way, untroubled by health and environmental consequences that their regulation is supposed to (but does not) prevent. These giants are backed by legal advisers and lobbyists prepared to find ways around no matter what obstacles. This is akin to the morality of the mafia. (Edward Milner)
2. By some measures, futile efforts like front of package labelling and taxing ultraprocessd edible products actually distract us from the structural changes that are needed to confront Big Food. (David McCoy) [By the way, so do offers of industry to ‘reformulate’ these products (less sugar, less fat, no transfats) that only white-wash their image still keeping us hooked on what actually are junk foods].
3. The capture of markets and diets by the ultraprocessd edible products industry points to the frightening proportion of child diets that derive from these products (with levels so high that they constitute ‘staple’ foods for them). This includes the saturation of food environments (schools, as well as retail markets) especially in poorer communities. Frightening also is the inadequate policy and legislative response to this trend by most governments (with some notable exceptions like Brazil, Chile, Mexico). (UNICEF)
4. Tactics used by Big Food and Big Soda to challenge government policies and legal measures include: Delay (slow down policy action); Dilute (weaken the impact of policies); Deflect (shift blame away from industry); Divide (exploit policy and claim holders’ fragmentation); Deny (challenge the evidence and silence critics); and Distract (create noise and false debate). (UNICEF and S. Gillespie)
Here is one you may not know
–With the new obesity treatments, Big Pharma steals profits from Big Food. (S. Gillespie)
5. But the practice dates back to much earlier. At the turn of the century, the tobacco industry pivoted to food when its core business was threatened. [Phillip Morris: Kraft, General Foods, Nabisco… and R. J. Reynold: Oreo, Mondelez Intl…] So you see, corporations grab a slice of competitors’ profits or they just buy them out (e.g., Bayer bought Monsanto). Corporations can profit first from the sale of harmful products and then again from the sale of the antidote. Nestlé now sells chewable multivitamins to be taken after bariatric surgery for obesity.
6. Modern medicine patches up bodies broken by the same system that produces the medicine —the dark side of circularity… Corporations meanwhile profit many times over —from driving the problem, selling the cure and then from marketing a whole new array of products that help with any side effects caused by taking the cure. Locked into all this, is the problem of oligopolies and monopolies, i.e., corporate capture, that always ends badly for citizens. (S. Gillespie)
7. Some complain that our food system is broken but, in fact, one could say that it is working exactly as a capitalist food system is supposed to work: It overproduces, it concentrates power and capital in the hands of a few and it leaves us (producers, consumers) with all of the externalities. (Eric Holt-Giminez)
Fighting back: a couple of key avenues
8. Food sovereignty: Food sovereignty is based on seven key principles: a) food as a basic human right; b) democratic control of the food system; c) agrarian reform; d) protecting natural resources; e) reorganizing food trade; f) ending the globalization of hunger; and g) fostering social peace. We must see food sovereignty and a solidarity economy as people’s political rights.
9. Capitalism and imperialism do not make food sovereignty possible, because they impose capitalist ideology at all levels constantly intensifying the exploitation of the agricultural system. Capitalism is thus not ‘one of several causes’; it is ‘the’ cause of this exploitation and thus is the problem we are called to address! The food sovereignty paradigm provides us with a basis from which to reflect-on and develop our critique of existing relations in a capitalist society. For instance: No food sovereignty in the South can be reached if there is no food sovereignty in the North.
10. Public health and food sovereignty are actually aspects of one indivisible whole. A public health care system is needed to guarantee healthy people that can struggle for all the key principles of food sovereignty. The struggle for food sovereignty also includes a struggle for agroecology –an urgent task for social movements on the ground.
Agroecology: the nemesis of the agro-industry
11. Given the boundless evidence that has been accumulated over the past two decades demonstrating agroecology’s multiple benefits, agroecology has justifiably become shorthand for the alternative approach promoted by social movements. National platforms have been particularly active in supporting the agroecological transition, building-on and enriching traditional practices. But beware: Agroecological approaches that are insensitive to concerns such as human rights, gender, age, traditional knowledge and/or socially embedded market arrangements easily lose their transformational potential.
Bottom line
12. In the current boom of capitalist assault on rural (and urban) societies and economies, value chains are bundled together with a pitch for ‘modern’, innovation-based, individualized agricultural entrepreneurship as the answer to the aspirations of rural youth. But this is a a truly false solution to the structural problems that push young people towards migration. Beware of what sounds inclusive but is not. Agroecology fights back.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
Postscript/Marginalia
–Food is a core societal thing. Food is first of all what joins all of us. And in whose hands the control of our food system is (including, of course, the control of water), in those hands the control of society lies. In other words, people can better govern their own lives, if food (the food system) is under their control. In that sense, all efforts made to get food back under the control of people is key for the development of society –and only by addressing this can we change our society into being more just and fair. (Jukka Lassila. Oma Maa Food Coop, Finland)