Malnutrition and Obesity: Two Sides of the Same Coin

In the world, 165 million children are undernourished, with major adverse consequences on their health and development: each year, a million and half infants die of hunger.

However, most of the world's population is either overweight or obese and suffers from associated ailments: diabetes and cardio-vascular disease are the first causes of death all over the world, inflicting enormous social and economic costs. Contrary to common wisdom, today obesity is a scourge in poor countries, too, which therefore suffer from the so-called double health burden. In fact, the prevalence of obesity is linked to income distribution inequality, rather than to a given country's level of GDP.

With the acceleration of globalization, the food system has been altered. On one side, industrialized food production has been increasingly oriented toward exports, seeking the maximization of profits, with the resulting externalization of social, health, and environmental costs associated with that production model (industrial fertilizers, chemical pesticides, GMOs etc.). This eclipses the necessity of meeting the population's nutritional needs, and endangering local agricultural capacity. On the other hand, those very marketing strategies have altered food consumption and feeding habits, starting at early childhood. The healthy food coming from direct harvesting and domestic transformation has been substituted by low-cost, high-calorie, highly processed, permanently available foods, which are damaging health and creating dependency.

The global increase in obesity leads one to predict a reduction in life expectancy, while a strong increase in health and social spending is already apparent, which will further grow in the long term. It is thus urgent that public policy gives health the priority, by putting controls on the marketing of foods that have adverse effects on consumer health, by introducing healthy foods in public canteens, and using taxation to provide incentives for the production and consumption of healthy food and discourage the consumption of junk food. However, experience teaches us that agribusiness companies tends to actively counter regulatory interventions aimed at protecting public health, seeing in them an obstacle to their commercial interests. The food industry is generally hostile to either soft-law measures, such as the WHO/UNICEF International Code of Marketing of Breast-Milk Substitutes , or hard-law interventions, such as the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.

This should not of course discourage the industry from taking CSR and self-regulation marketing initiatives, but in general these are usually responses to market pressures (changes in consumer demand and ethical shifts in consumption) or pre-emption of government intervention. Public-private co-regulatory approaches should also be considered, but only if there are adequate mechanisms to monitor transparency and ensure there is no conflict of interest.

Local production and consumption

At any rate, the ecologically sustainable production and consumption of healthy, nutritious, no-frills food should be a global priority, in order to integrate regulation and education strategies at the local, national, and global levels. It's critical to acknowledge the structural causes of inequality and address them. The growing awareness that the current mode of development is unsustainable, and the large number of endeavors promoting local agriculture, are just steps in achieving a world where nobody lacks food in either adequate quantity or quality.