Reasons To Be Cheerful…. & Fearful
New Food Systems Countdown analysis offers hope as well as concerns
This week, we’re back to regular programming: talking about food systems.
It’s not that I’ve lost interest in the shitshow we never voted to be a part of, or that I’m no longer fuming. I just think there’s merit in the advice to focus on one or two things you care about, instead of being overwhelmed by the flooding of the zone.
Having said that, I do have two and a half messages.
(1) If you know of anyone who might be interested in supporting great Burmese journalists, please give me a shout. They were already working under extremely challenging conditions, but now they’re in serious trouble due to the aid cut.
(1.5) Related to that, please support good journalism. I am a true believer that news should be free but we need to eat too. If you don’t want the media to be controlled only by oligarchs or dictators, please help us stay independent.
(2) This will likely be a very small Venn diagram, but if you happen to be in Reykjavik on March 3, or know anyone who will be, and are interested in Burma/Myanmar, I’m giving a talk at Reykjavik University. More details here.
The Food Systems Countdown Initiative (FSCI) was established to provide both decision-makers and us, ordinary people, with a set of indicators to track how well (or badly) our food systems are doing.
There are a total of 50 indicators under five themes: diets, nutrition, and health; environment, production, and natural resources; livelihoods, poverty, and equity; governance; and resilience.
The initiative involves more than 50 researchers from all over the world and it is the first science-based - and so far the most comprehensive - monitoring of our food systems.
The first analysis was published at the end of 2023. Last month, they published the first update on what has changed and what remains the same.
Where we were
First, let’s backtrack a little bit. Here are the five key findings from last year.
Every country struggled with at least one form of malnutrition and many countries suffered from more than one.
In 54 out of 140 countries with data, over half of the population couldn’t afford a healthy diet, as a result of income differentials, not how much a healthy diet cost.
Total food system emissions were generally increasing and remained high.
Food system workers tended to have low incomes and faced poor working conditions, and many food supply chains were characterised by power imbalances.
There were critical data gaps, including indicators that can capture the welfare of food system workers beyond agriculture.
If you want to dig further, you can find the original documents here, or read what I wrote last year.
Where we are now: Reasons to be cheerful
The researchers were able to analyse 42 indicators for trends. Of these, nearly half - 20 - across all five Countdown themes showed changes in the right direction.
The indicators with the great percentage of positive change include access to information and access to safe water. The latter is critical for food security as well as for food safety.
We’re also doing better in terms of:
reducing the emission intensity of beef and milk (meaning fewer emissions per unit of the product),
nitrogen use efficiency (meaning wasting less and therefore reducing the run-off that ends up polluting the environment),
the availability of fruits and vegetables,
yields of multiple foods including cereals, beef and vegetables, and
stability in the food supply.
In addition, we have fewer undernourished people and more people can afford a healthy diet compared to the previous baseline.
What’s even more encouraging is that for quite a few of these indicators, the trend is relatively uniform across regions.
The analysis also finds that countries are becoming more aware of the importance of food environments. These refer not only to the physical but also the social, economical, cultural, and political factors that influence our diets.
Ergo, unhealthy food environments tend to lead to unhealthy diets and bad nutritional outcomes.
Some countries are now responding to this with economic policies like taxing unearthly foods or subsidising healthy ones, or with regulatory instruments like requiring labels or reformulation, or restricting marketing and advertising.
Where we are now: Reasons to be fearful
Alas, it is not all good news. Seven out of 42 indicators “have significantly worsened globally over this period” while 12 showed no progress, which, in this case, isn’t actually good news.
The seven that’s going in the wrong direction include:
the increase in food price volatility,
the decrease in government accountability,
rising pesticide use, and
falling civil society participation.
What do these mean in practice? There’s less stability in terms of food prices (even if the supply has increased), we’re destroying our ecosystems and our health, and the work on food systems are becoming less inclusive.
Let me dwell a bit on the government accountability part, because I think this is a crucial point.
I’ve written extensively about how insidious and problematic it is - but also very effective - to blame individuals for their health and nutrition outcomes. This is because the narrative that we currently have the freedom around our dietary choices is an illusion.
This means we need effective government leadership to counter industry lobbying and pressure. But what happens when there isn’t one?
In many Central Asian countries where governments aren’t using either economic or regulatory tools to improve the health environments, the researchers found they have the highest prevalence of daily soft drink consumption (43.4% versus 19.3% globally) and the highest in dietary factors that increase the risk of non-communicable diseases (NCDs). NCDs are the #1 cause of death and disaiblity worldwide.
Other disheartening findings: Healthy diets are costing more, and there’s an increase in both rural underemployment and the proportion of the population who are either reducing the quality and quantity of food they eat or skipping meals altogether.
Indicators that haven’t showed any change include:
sales of ultra-processed foods (associated with poor health outcomes),
greenhouse gas emissions from food systems,
water withdrawal for irrigation,
the capacity to respond to foodborne diseases, and
the percentage of farmland that contains a sufficient diversity of species to withstand shocks.
My concern here is that many of the indicators seeing negative change (or not seeing positive change) are systemic and much harder to budge. For example, under both “Governance” and “Environment, natural resources, and production”, more indicators are going in the wrong direction.
However, Jessica Fanzo, one of the four experts who lead FSCI and someone whose work I admire, said there are also specific thing that could be improved upon, like the use of pesticides.
Where we are now: An overall picture
So we pretty much have a tie: 20 in the right direction, and 19 in the wrong direction.
“This is not entirely surprising. Food systems are dynamic, and while you often hear that food systems are “broken” there have been strides in improving the functionality of food systems,” Jess wrote in an e-mail response to my queries.
“Yet clearly, food systems are not performing optimally for everyone, everywhere all at once. We need more attention, commitments and funding to ensure food systems are fair, sustainable and resilient and get all those indicators moving in the right direction.”
Where we can push for change
The report also examines the interactions within and across the 50 indicators, providing some illuminating - if not entirely surprising - results.
“Interactions are critical because change (or lack thereof) in one indicator can cause (or block) changes in others, complicating decision-making and giving rise to trade-offs between goals as well as unintended consequences,” the researchers said.
They found “Governance” and “Resilience” indicators as having the largest number of connections to the other themes.
The findings “provide clues that improving governance could be key leverage points to improve food systems,” said Jess. “Governance is cross cutting in that it is highly influential and other domains of food systems, be it health, environment or livelihoods are dependent on getting governance right.”
At the risk of sounding repetitive, that’s also why I was concerned with the direction of the “Governance” indicators.
Other indicators, such as diet quality and food price volatility, have many contributing factors, so if we want to change these for the better, it will require coordinated actions across multiple sectors and actors. It won’t be easy, but at least we now know what it will take.
Of course, it’s always important to remember we’re talking about systems, meaning we need to consider the potential consequences of our decisions from multiple perspectives. The researchers explained this succinctly in their peer-reviewed paper.
“Policies targeting short-term objectives to ensure calorie sufficiency may not consider the long-term impacts of large-scale monocropping on biodiversity or pest adaptation nor the impacts of staple-focused policies on nutrition.”
“Maximising crop and livestock productivity through intensive systems has not only led to increased food availability but also contributed to environmental degradation, declining diet quality for some populations and increased inequality between small- and large-holder production systems.”
“Part of understanding, addressing and preventing these pernicious unintended outcomes is making food systems’ interactions more explicit so that they can be directly managed and governed.”
What if you want to dig further
The Food Systems Dashboard is a great resource for anyone who’s interested in knowing more about how their country is doing with regards to the Countdown indicators and their neighbours, or to understand how its food systems are performing.
I checked out the three different countries I consider home - Burma/Myanmar, Italy, and Iceland - and discovered some interesting stuff. I recommend playing around.
Further Reading
Peer-reviewed paper in Nature and it is open access (yay!): Governance and resilience as entry points for transforming food systems in the countdown to 2030
Thin’s Pickings
Only political will can end world hunger: Food isn’t scarce, but many people can’t access it - The Conversation
“History has shown us again and again that, so long as inequality goes unchecked, no amount of technology can ensure people are well fed.”
Hear, hear! Jennifer Clapp’s response to the call by 150 Nobel and World Food Prize laureates (which also prompted me to write this issue) is clear, concise, and much-needed.
Interesting interview by Francesca Barca with Hervé Kempf, journalist and founder of the independent and self-sustaining (gasp!) French environmental media outlet Reporterre.
The Mediterranean diet is a lie - Politico
Insightful and provocative piece by Alessandro Ford that charts the rise of Mediterranean diet and how this world-famous cuisine, lauded for its benefits to health, has “become a mishmash of hyperbole, half-truths and howlers, stirred together for political and commercial ends”. A must-read.
Myanmar migrants forced to join junta forces after deportation from Thailand - The New Humanitarian
This piece is from local news outlet Dawei Watch, and full disclosure, I helped edit it. It’s another example of the kind of journalism that’s in danger of disappearing due to the dismantling of USAID.What an ‘America First’ Diet Would Really Look Like - The Atlantic
”The U.S. produces plenty of grains, oils, sweeteners, and meat, but far less fresh produce and legumes; in recent years, the country has become a net importer of food,” writes Yasmin Tayag. That means an America First Food System is likely to be much less healthy.
As always, please feel free to share this post and send tips and thoughts on bluesky @thinink.bsky.social, mastodon @ThinInk@journa.host, my LinkedIn page, or via e-mail thin@thin-ink.net.
Thank you! It is rare to see passionate motivating forces as you clearly express. Everyone needs at least one passion and if you can support yourself on your passion you've got the keys to the kingdom. My wishes for continued successes you can see it in your efforts. Namaste