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Lancet says three threats are interacting to create a dangerous ‘syndemic.’

Climate change is bringing crop failures, reduced food production, droughts and flooding, and civil unrest, report warns. Somalian Nuura Omar and her family were driven to an aid camp by drought. Photo from Oxfam, Creative Commons licensed.

The Lancet calls it the “Global Syndemic.” The report’s authors say we’re facing three pandemics — undernutrition, obesity and climate change — that are interacting to form a “synergy of epidemics,” or syndemic, and it’s a global problem.

Here’s how it works. Undernourished children in low-income and middle-income countries suffer from stunting, which makes them smaller than well-nourished children. But it also makes them more susceptible to obesity (which affects kids and adults in high-income countries even more). By 2015, obesity was affecting two billion people around the world. They’ve been set up to die of cardiovascular diseases, Type 2 diabetes and some cancers.

The report says, “Economic losses attributable to undernutrition are equivalent to 11 per cent of the GDP in Africa and Asia, or approximately $3.5 trillion annually.” As we add another billion undernourished people by 2030, those losses will worsen.

Meanwhile, climate change is having serious effects on human health, bringing “crop failures, reduced food production, extreme weather events that produce droughts and flooding, increased food-borne and other infectious diseases, and civil unrest.” Those climate effects, the report says, will end up costing five to 10 per cent of global GDP, while investing just one per cent of GDP could stop the increase in climate change.

The Lancet report is blunt about why we do so little, citing “the power of vested interests by commercial actors whose engagement in policy often constitutes a conflict of interest that is at odds with the public good and planetary health.”

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The hidden cost of UK food: Is malnutrition a national scandal?

March 30, 2018

The hidden cost of UK food: Is malnutrition a national scandal?

According to the WHO, world hunger is on the rise again due to conflict and climate change, after falling for the previous decade. In a report published September 2017, it estimated that 815 million people were suffering from hunger, more than one in every ten people globally, 98% of whom are found in developing countries.

However, while hunger is a prevalent form of malnutrition in developing countries, malnourishment can also be found far closer to home, here in the UK, where its impact is significant and increasing. NHS England calls malnutrition a “common problem”, affecting millions of people in the UK. It is largely a concern for those with long-term health issues that affect appetite, people who are socially isolated and with limited mobility, and most commonly, the elderly. Following a study undertaken by the Office of National Statistics, which showed that 391 people died in the UK from malnutrition in 2015, former Lib Dem leader Tim Farron called it a, “national scandal that anyone is being admitted to hospital from malnutrition.” So, what is really is to blame for such high rates of the condition, in one of the world’s richest nations?

‘Malnutrition’ means, literally, ‘poor nutrition’ and technically it can refer to over-nutrition – getting more nutrients than you need, as well as under-nutrition – not getting enough nutrients or an inadequate balance of nutrients. In the UK the available statistics for malnutrition relate only to under-nutrition, hence our focus on this issue in the Sustainable Food Trust’s recently published report, The Hidden Cost of UK Food.

Drawing on published research, the report calculated that malnutrition costs the country approximately £17 billion annually. This includes the cost of treating malnourished people in hospitals and long-term care facilities, GP visits and outpatient appointments. In general, rates of malnutrition are not due to a shortage of food per se, but to a range of complex issues which include increased consumption of processed foods and reduced preparation of meals from fresh primary ingredients, part of which relates to low incomes and part of which relates to poor nutritional education and/or the lack of adequate food preparation facilities.

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We know how food production needs to change if crisis is to be avoided – so why isn’t this happening?

March 29, 2018

We know how food production needs to change if crisis is to be avoided – so why isn’t this happening?

As the world races toward a projected 9 billion inhabitants, the failings of dominant food systems are impossible to deny. Current food production methods are severely polluting. They are the cause of malnutrition. They are also inequitable, and unjustifiably wasteful. And they are concentrated in the hands of few corporations. Entangled in the multiple crises humanity is facing, establishing global food security is considered a key challenge of our time.

Against the backdrop of climate change, resource shortages and urbanisation, the question of how to ensure adequate food supply for everyone looms rather large. The usual responseemphasises intensifying the output of agriculture through the common model of petrochemical, large-scale, one-crop, intensive farming.

But business as usual is no longer an option for food and agriculture. The global agriculture system will have to be radically transformed to avoid further environmental and social problems, as was concluded by a three-year study commissioned by the UN and the World Bank involving more than 400 scientists. This report, as well as subsequent international studies by the UN Conference on Trade and Development and the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, have convincingly demonstrated that agroecology – farming that imitates natural ecosystems – is the most promising pathway to sustainable food systems on all continents.

Industrial soybean farming in Brazil. Alf Ribeiro / Shutterstock.com

Agroecology

Agroecology is based on the idea that farms should mimic the structure and functioning of natural ecosystems. In ecosystems, there is no “waste”: nutrients are recycled indefinitely. Agroecology aims to close nutrient loops – returning all nutrients that come out of the soil, back to the soil. In the case of vegetable farming, for example, this could be achieved through composting of vegetable scraps, human and farmyard manure.

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