Many IDS members, including my colleagues from the Food Equity Centre, are participating in G20 and T20 processes – running alongside the G20. IDS is a member of the International Advisory Council and is participating actively with leadership roles within task forces, as well as through policy briefs and side event proposals with many of our longstanding partner think-tanks from the Global South.
Under the Brazilian Presidency of the G20 this year, a recent G20 Social Meeting on the global economy and inequalities focused on hunger, and I was invited to address a roundtable on agrifood systems and social emergency. Understanding the ways that food systems are contributing to social crises, namely violations of labour rights, and unhealthy diets, is crucial to this, but first we must understand the flaws in our agrifood systems.
Agrifood systems
Global capacity to produce, process, transport, and market food has improved dramatically in recent decades. Largely thanks to technological innovation, the only major threat to global food availability is presented by climate change. For now, there is no doubt that agrifood systems can easily supply enough food to meet the world’s subsistence needs. Even the recent threat to international food supply chains, caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, temporarily disrupted but did not collapse the global food system.
However, this success story has come with a paradox. Increasing food availability has not resulted in improved access to healthy diets for all. Agrifood systems should create equitable outcomes for workers engaged in the food system, as well as equitable outcomes for the wider society that depends on food systems for their subsistence needs. Equitable food systems prioritise decent working conditions, fair wages, affordable food prices, human health, and ecological sustainability.
Instead, agrifood systems are contributing to social emergencies. The contradictions caused by corporate capitalism undermine the wellbeing of people, animals, and the planet. For example, within the agriculture sector, farm workers and daily labourers are often exploited by commercial farmers, so many farmers get rich while their workers go hungry. In South Africa, farm workers have a saying that “Die boer se hond eet beter as ons”, which means “The farmer’s dog eats better than us.”
Also, intensification of livestock production compromises animal welfare, because costs related to the quality of life of animals are cut, to maximise production and profits. Finally, unregulated profiteering activities, such as clearing the Amazonian rainforest for cattle-ranching, threaten the future sustainability of the planet.
Labour rights violations
Across the world, agricultural workers are often underpaid and face unethical working conditions. One case in point relates to exposure to pesticides on commercial farms.
Many pesticides are produced in Europe, where they are banned because they are hazardous to human health, but they are exported to countries in the Global South where they are still legal. Studies have shown that the use of these pesticides by farmers causes respiratory diseases and other illnesses for farm workers and their families, including their children.
In South Africa, a civil society organisation called Women on Farms Project (WoFP) has consistently campaigned against the use of harmful pesticides. To draw global attention to labour rights violations – including lack of protective clothing during and after crop spraying – WoFP bought a farm worker a share in Tesco, a British supermarket chain that sourced its fruit from the farm where she worked, and accompanied the farm worker to a Tesco shareholder meeting in London. Sharing her experience with shareholders led to the supermarket insisting that farmers provide protective clothing to their workers.
Since 2019, WoFP has lobbied the South African government to ban the import and use of hazardous pesticides (which it has now committed to do by June 2024), as well as governments in Europe, and the European Commission, to ban the production and export of hazardous pesticides by European chemical companies. Following the recently introduced human rights supply chain due diligence legislation in some European countries, the export of dangerous pesticides to the Global South could soon be stopped – a success story for civil society activism on behalf of workers who traditionally have no power in agrifood systems.
Unhealthy diets
The agrifood industry produces and promotes the consumption of unhealthy foods, especially ultra-processed foods that contain too much fat, salt and sugar. This can be explained entirely as profit maximisation strategies. Certain processes, ingredients and artificial additives that enhance a product’s shelf life and intensify taste sensations are good for corporate profits, but bad for human health. Food corporations and their executives and shareholders get richer by creating public health emergencies – because they prioritise private profit over public health.
Countries across the world are facing epidemics of non-communicable diseases, such as diabetes and heart disease. There is also a global obesity epidemic, caused partly by sedentary lifestyles but also by unhealthy diets. Whereas undernutrition and hunger affect mainly the poor, overnutrition and obesity affect wealthier people as well, because this outcome is related to inadequate quality of food consumed, not inadequate quantity of food consumed.
What can governments do?
Across the world, governments are starting to intervene to try to regulate unhealthy diets. For example, some governments have introduced a “sugar tax” on fizzy drinks, and Ministries of Education have improved the quality of school meals. So-called junk food has been banned from many schools, to try to discourage children from acquiring a taste for daily consumption of crisps and chocolates and sweets. Some governments have recently banned the advertising of unhealthy products, especially those that target children.
Consumer behaviour is also targeted by the introduction of “front of package labelling”, which informs consumers whether specific food products contain excessive sugars, saturated fats, and sodium or salt. Just like warning labels on cigarettes, such labels are intended to encourage consumers to make better choices when they go shopping. These are relatively modest interventions, but actors in the agrifood industry such as the “sugar lobby” have resisted even these cautious attempts to shift citizens towards healthier diets.
In my view, governments need to be much stronger in their interventions, not just by nudging consumers at the far end of the food chain, but by regulating and penalising producers and marketers at the heart of the food supply chain. For example, governments should ban or severely restrict the production, marketing and sale of ultra-processed foods that have been proven to be damaging to people’s health. Money raised by taxing unhealthy food products should be used to subsidise healthy foods, such as fresh fruit and vegetables. National food security and nutrition policies should aim to improve equitable practices and outcomes at all stages of the food system.
Radical interventions needed
Until the social emergencies caused by the unethical behaviour of powerful actors in agrifood systems towards less powerful actors and citizens is seriously addressed, damaging outcomes will only get worse, not just for poor and vulnerable people, but for all of us. This requires citizen mobilisation and civil society activism, to put pressure on governments and food system actors. Radical interventions are needed that address the root causes of hunger, obesity, cruelty to farmed animals, and the destruction of the environment, by transforming agrifood systems.
Food systems should not be profit-driven. Food should not be commodified. There should be a justiciable right to food in all countries, along with intensified efforts to achieve zero hunger. This is an issue that urgently requires action from G20 members, and beyond.
