An International Plan to Beat Big Food

Many will shake their heads in disbelief, but Italy is the European country with the highest rate of child obesity. Given increasingly common images of children facing screens with high-calories snacks in one hand and a remote or a mouse in the other, one would imagine that policies aimed at stopping this epidemic would have the full support of public opinion. Nothing could be farther from the truth: one only needs to think at how the recent proposal to tax carbonated beverages miserably flunked.

It was slammed down as a mere sales tax to raise fiscal revenues. What if it were a useful tool in limiting the consumption of obesity-inducing foods that are aggressively advertised by corporate food giants? These are the same corporations that in the United States have managed to treat pizza as a vegetable, so that its consumption would continue to be allowed in school cafeterias. One thing is certain: no matter the solution devised, collaboration of civil society is indispensable. This does not seem to be the case in Italy, where public awareness of the issue is still very limited.

The various recent CSR initiatives implemented by the food industry have proved to be highly utilitarian. Effective regulation was met by intense lobbying crossfire: just like Big Tobacco, Big Food uses marketing strategies to limit the perception of the effective threat posed to global health by its products. To help individual countries meet the challenge, the international agreement promoted by the World Health Organization (WHO) can be useful, as the case WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control has proven. Although potentially the most effective solution, it's not the easiest to reach, due to high costs, difficulties in influencing emerging economies due to the pressures of the food industry and the limits posed by national sovereignty. In 2005, the UN acknowledged the fundamental role of civil society in raising awareness, promoting and monitoring solutions, since this can be highly effective in countering the effect of corporate lobbying.

In Italy there is still a lot to do. Of the 85 organizations that are part of the Italian network to implement the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child, only 17 take on the issue of child obesity on their websites. The prevailing approach is to merely refer the user to publications on the subject, while the few public awareness campaigns do not confront food corporations, but rather raise the problem of individuals' healthy lifestyles.

It is instead of paramount importance that the idea of regulation be not counterposed to that of individual freedom, strategically upheld by lobbies and myopically supported by few consumers' associations, which for their own interests (e.g. low prices) have decided to side with the food industry.

So what's needed is to stimulate civil society organizations to react to the obesity problem and its root causes. An ill-informed society, rather than being allied with institutions to find sustainable solutions, becomes a hindrance to progress in public health.