Journal of the World Public Health Nutrition Association
Published monthly at www.wphna.org/worldnutrition/
Fabio Gomes, External Affairs Secretary, World Public Health Nutrition Association
Jeanette Longfield, Co-ordinator, Sustain
Claudio Schuftan, People’s Health Movement
Luciene Burlandy, Brazilian Forum of Food and Nutrition Security and Sovereignty
Michael Jacobson, Executive Director, Center for Science in the Public Interest
Elisabetta Recine, National Council of Food and Nutrition Security of Brazil
Tim Lobstein, Director of Policy & Programmes, International Obesity Task Force
Jane Martin, Executive Manager, Obesity Policy Coalition Australia
Flavio Valente, Secretary General, FIAN International
Alejandro Calvillo, El Poder del Consumidor Mexico
Big Food
What it is and why it needs watching
Access February 2013 column on ideas and meals here[
Say 6 key links (not these, obviously) ]
Access March 2013 column on dimensions of nutrition and on best being small here
Access April 2013 WN column on dietetics as the mother of nutrition here
Access May 2013 WN column on the need to agitate here
Access June-July WN column on language and its abuse here
Access May 2013 WN column on the need to agitate here
Access June-July WN column on language and its abuse here
What Big Food is. 300[
GC to draft this weekl ].
Why it needs watching.
The rapid rise in nutrition-related problems worldwide has been increasingly recognised is a major threat for public health, but also a concern for many sectors involved in shaping economic, environmental and social policies. Big food producers, manufacturers and distributors operate concentrating power, standardising products, tastes and processes, dominating local food systems and hence threatening food sovereignty, agro-biodiversity and socio-economic sustainability.
As commercial operators, they aim at maintaining and expanding their markets and providing rising dividends to their shareholders. As a result they are often in conflict with the interests of public health besides of other areas in the public interest, and for this reason they have been attempting to protect their brands, products and image from been exposed and linked to harmful practices and outcomes. Their approach has three main purposes: to convince policy-makers and decision-takers that they are able to provide the solution; to preempt or undermine statutory measures that are aimed at restricting the demand for their products and limiting the promotion of unhealthy eating practices; and to protect their images and brands from demonization.
To meet their mandate to increase product share, turnover, profits and shareholder value, Big Food corporations act displacing local foods, meals and eating practices and rituals by ultra-processed products, snacking, mindless eating and overeating practices, and also impoverishing agro-biodiversity by electing a few products to be produced and traded worldwide under their control.
Hence it is essential to reveal products, policies and practices that clearly, or in a veiled way, have been hindering the progress of effective public health nutrition policies and threatening health-promoting, agro-biodiverse and equitable food systems worldwide.
BIG FOOD WATCH
Editor’s note
Big Food Watch is now a regular series in WN. Convenor is WN Assistant Editor Fabio
Gomes. He was a member of the programme committee for the Rio2012 conference
held in April 2012, and is the food and nutrition policy analyst at INCA, Brazil’s national
cancer institute. He is an experienced public health nutritionist from the global South,
already networked with civil society and public interest leaders and organisations
worldwide. Like all contributions to WN, Big Food Watch is and will express the views of its
authors, and should not be taken to be the policy or view of the World Public Health
Nutrition Association (the Association) except when this is explicitly stated.
Brazil is a good centre for this work. The country is now a participatory democracy whose public officials work in partnership with civil society organisations in framing and operating policies and programmes designed to prevent and control all forms of malnutrition. Brazil is also called an ‘emerging market economy’. Like other countries in the global South it has a growing middle class, and like them its food systems, and patterns of diet and nutrition, health and disease, are transforming as a result of the penetration of international food product manufacturers, retailers and ‘fast food’ chains. The result, often welcomed as a sign of ‘development’, impacts on agriculture, land use, water resources, rural and urban employment, food culture, and family life. A specific effect is to displace freshly prepared meals with ready-to-consume processed products.
The task of Big Food Watch is to do as its title implies – to observe the activities in particular of transnational food and drink product corporations. Commercial priorities often conflict with those of public health, but the ethics of corporations vary. Big Food Watch will give credit when this is deserved. Its policy, as shown with the Nestlé Creating Shared Value initiative in the September issue of WN, and as shown in this issue with baby formula industries’ tactics towards patenting breastmilk components, and with Nestlé, Danone and Coca-Cola’s strategies to take over water supply, is to display and describe corporate activity, so readers can judge for themselves. WN will welcome responses. Much corporate activity takes place behind closed doors or in the shadows, unseen by policy-makers, opinion-formers, other professionals, or citizens. Big Food Watch will try to open the doors and let in the light.
Its policy, as shown with the Nestlé Creating Shared Value initiative in the September issue of WN, and as shown in this issue with baby formula industries’ tactics towards patenting breastmilk components, is to display and describe corporate activity, so readers can judge for themselves. WN will welcome responses. Much corporate activity takes place behind closed doors or in the shadows, unseen by policy-makers, opinion-formers, other professionals, or citizens. Big Food Watch will try to open the doors and let in the light.
Claudio Schuftan
FLAVIO: VE SI ALGUNAS DE ESTAS IMAGENES PUEDEN SERVIRTE. BUSQUE EN MUCHOS LUGARES Y NO PUDE ENCONTRAR UNA FOTO DE JUDITH RICHTER.
INTA, Chile. Cortesia de Carmen This is an under two years feeding guidelines brochure produced by INTA in Chile. As can be seen, It is sponsored by Big Food.
20ICN (@20_icn)
17-09-13 13:31
Visite el stand de #Nestle no17 para conocer sus compromisos en nutrición y participar de las sesiones científicas #ICN20 @nestlecsv
IUNS Congress in Granada 2013 publicized Nestlé in its tweets.. Cortesia de Carmen
Esta es una imagen (foto) del stand de Coca Cola en Granada. No logro copiarla aqui. Cortesia de Carmen
CREES ESTO TE SERVIRIA? TB CORTESIA DE CARMEN
Big poultry destroys rural economies and hurts family farmers.
Claudio Schuftan is a pediatrician originally from Chile. He is dedicated to issues of the right to health and the right to nutrition…. As member of the steering council of of the People’s Health Movement[Link to website], a civil society network that works on issues of ‘Health For All”, he is an activist working on all these issues. He is a frequent contributor to WPHNA. Claudio’s major achievement(s) include(s) the fortnightly publication of his Human Rights Readers since 2005 and his dedicated work for PHM.
Big Food Public Relations Laundering
‘Next time you hear of a big food or beverage company sponsoring an after-school physical activity program in your community, you can be sure they’ll say it’s to show ‘our company’s concern for our kids’ health.’ But the real intent is to look angelic while making consumers feel good about the brand and drawing attention away from the unhealthful nature of the company’s products’. (Michael Mudd, former Executive Vice President of Global Corporate Affairs for Kraft Foods)
Many of our biggest food problems can be traced back to the Big Food monopolies that have taken control of our food system and of many of our governments. In this piece, I thus want to pay tribute to Judith Richter who has been a pioneer in unmasking the widespread corporate manipulations of Big Food. In the case I want to highlight today, I will cite her views on what she calls public relations laundering. I paraphrase:
Concealment of industry attempts to manipulate public debate is an essential feature of corporate propaganda. A corporate public relations campaign designed to engineer public consent to a particular industry’s views often tries to hide the origin and true aim of the ‘persuasive’ message.
One of the most frequently- employed techniques is to get corporate public relations material reproduced as ‘factual’ articles in the press. Investigative journalist Mark Dowie has estimated that 40% of all US ‘news’ articles are laundered public relations messages.
Another technique is using ‘two-step-communication’ defined as ‘persuasion which uses a middle man or opinion leader to influence the masses’. Walter von Wartburg, an international communications spokesperson for Novartis (the Swiss pharmaceutical giant formed by the 1996 merger of Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz, which owns baby food company Gerber) suggests that a company should deal with public criticism by providing a ‘psychological underpinning of a company’s own statement through third parties which enjoy public trust’. Many middlemen may be unaware that they are being used primarily as part of a public relations strategy to deflect criticism.
Corporations have repeatedly tried to set up ‘social awareness strategies’ or ‘independent social audit committees’.
A bit of history
In 1985, for example, Nestlé: created the Nestlé Infant Formula Audit Commission (NIFAC), and granted it a regular budget appointing as a chair the former US Secretary of State Edmund Muskie. The official task of this committee was to monitor Nestlé’s marketing practices. Nestlé considered this a major factor in gaining the trust of its more moderate and constructive critics. NIFAC is still cited today by industry as an example of good public relations practice; Novartis’s von Wartburg described it as a notable example of ‘active agenda setting’. For companies on the defensive, it can be useful ‘to refer controversial critical issues to third parties which enjoy public trust’. He contended that this could provide a ‘legitimate gain of time’ and could defuse ‘escalated situations’. The International Baby Food Action Network (IBFAN), however, described the Muskie Committee as a tool to undercut independent monitoring and as an expensive filter to divert press attention and win constituencies. Nestlé disbanded the Muskie Commission in 1991 — after its return from a fact-finding mission in Mexico that concluded that Nestlé had grossly violated the provisions against free supplies of infant formula. Of the 108 complaints submitted by the British Baby Milk Action Coalition in January 1991 to the Commission, only five were processed before the Commission’s dissolution.
Another common veiling technique is to set up a ‘front’, i.e., an organisation established to appear as an independent third party, but actually supporting the individual or the organisation in controversy. Extending this tactic, public relations organisations have started to organise corporate ‘grass-roots’ organisations or movements, a technique known as ‘astroturf lobbying’. This means they form ‘public interest’ groups whose names contain words such as ‘fairness’, ‘balance’, ‘choice’, ‘coalition’ and ‘alliance’ — all words that resound very positively.
Reference: Richter, J. (1998). Engineering of Consent: Uncovering Corporate PR, Briefing paper. Dorset: The CornerHouse. http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk
Postscript
If we think these practices are thing of the past, we better wake up. These practices are well and alive in 2013. If you are not convinced, look at the glossy and lavishly illustrated annual ‘corporate responsibility’ publications corporations, Big Food included, publish every year. The fact is that corporations do still use public relations techniques especially to limit our campaigns against their socially-irresponsible or environmentally-destructive practices. I invite your comments.
Fabio Gomes
Fabio Gomes is a Brazilian nutritionist. He is currently the External Affairs secretary of the WPHNA, which is…… He has been dedicated to progressing public health nutrition policies and protecting them from big food interference. He is a tireless advocate of the regulation of conflicts of interests and an admirer and watchman of sovereign, agro-biodiverse, health-promoting and equitable food systems. One of his major achievements relates to conceiving the World Nutrition Rio 2012 congress, which was a turn in the pages of the history of nutrition and its congresses.
Patenting nature
Amazonian flora (cupuaçú) and fauna (Kambô frog) under multinational ‘inventors’ sight
To exemplify how Big Food Watch is needed, I have chosen one of the cases related to big food practices on patenting naturally occurring substances and their use. Cupuaçú a native Amazon fruit, is a product of nature and so are their ‘naturally occurring’ fats and oils, but there is still place in some legislation worldwide that make them passive to be patented. The Japanese multinational Asahi Foods Co Ltd has initiated in 1999 the application process to patent a cupuaçú oil and fat composition extracted from its seeds. The application process started in their headquarters’ country, where they got the necessary paperwork approved to proceed with multinational applications (US and European Union). Along the process they have even created a subsidiary called Cupuacu International. Fortunately at the end, Amazonian civil society organisations succeeded and the patent applications have been withdrawn. But this was only one battle of a daily war based on the continuation of the exploitation of Latin-America’s wealth by high income colonial and neo-colonial countries. Of which patenting is only one of the strategies used to take over nature, natural resources and ‘naturally occurring’ components for corporative/private purpose. It may also involve bio-piracy. Which is the case for Captopril, which was developed in 1960-1970s from an extract of the venom of the Brazilian viper Bothrops jararaca that was taken to England and ended up being manufactured by Squibb. It is also the case for Phyllomedusa bicolor a tiny frog found in Guianas, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia and Brazil, from which for centuries indigenous people extracted its coetaneous secretion to produce the frog vaccine, which is used for several medicinal and religious purposes. There are now around ten patent applications worldwide claiming for its use (ref[http://www.amazonlink.org/biopirataria/kampu.htm]).
For thousands of years, indigenous and other traditional people (e.g. fishermen, maroons, siringueiros) have identified and developed skills to make good and sustainable use of naturally occurring substances found in flora and fauna. The non-indigenous world keep extending their colonialist and neo-colonialist practices upon them by imposing a scientific paradigm that does not make any sense to the traditional knowledge one, and as result penalise them for not patenting their own wisdom and skills in first place. To an extent that it almost implies that nothing has ever existed or been done before it becomes patented. Even René Descartes would be tempted to change his saying to ‘I was patented, therefore I exist.’