I just discovered a new website called, short and simple, Resilience.org, which has really great and well-researched stories as well as resources and groups that help build community resilience. Over the weekend, I read a story called “The Impact of Transnational ‘Big Food’ Companies on The South: A View From Brazil“.
Image by Victor Gonzalez, via Flickr CC.
Following up on the news that Mexico has replaced the United States of America as the nation with the highest obesity rate in the hemisphere (apparently Nauru holds the global title with a 71.1% rate of obesity), I was curious to see a stance from a close-by country on whether, and how, the ‘American diet’, spread by transnational corporations, could replace eating habits formed through centuries of local custom and culture.
A couple of interesting points that I took from the article are as follows:
- Despite globalization and an influx of a certain number of multinational brands, by and large Brazil still retains its long-established dietary patterns and eating customs – meals are still eaten communally to a large extent, rice, beans and manioc remain the staple foods in the diet, and restaurants and cantines continue to offer traditional foods to affordable prices.
- However, the authors warn from romanticizing the traditional diets, which are high in salt (because of the seafaring colonizers’ background) and sugary (because the ubiquity of sugarcane makes table sugar ‘the cheapest source of calories in the country‘). Thus, traditional doesn’t mean there couldn’t be improvements in making the diet a little more health-conscious.
- The article also addresses the interesting issue of why multinational food companies see the need to move into emerging markets – the fact that we can only eat so much and, according to their research, “in any country a saturation point is reached when ultra-processed products supply around 60% of total calories, as has been the case in the UK and in Canada and the US for the last two decades“. Since most of the ‘developed’ world has reached this figure, Nestle and co. just need more people to feed in order to continuously increase their bottom line – and emerging markets are easy targets. – Besides just fascinating from an anthopological point of view, the 60% figure kind of baffled me – but then, when thinking about it, just made me sad.
- Furthermore, the article makes a great point about the public-private partnerships lauded by UN, governments and development associations – you know, the ones that can create shared value by, for example, offering employment opportunities and access to covered goods while enlarging companies markets {I wish there were a sarcasm font}. The authors ask – why are ‘public-private partnerships’ always restricted to the big players? Why aren’t there PPPs with those actors that have been excluded up to now, including “national industries (with a few exceptions), the retail trade (unless burger chains are counted), low-input and “organic” producers and growers, the horticulture industries (again, with a few exceptions), food and farming cooperatives, and family and smaller manufacturers, all of which have minimal or no representation in the “partnership””? Now that would be something that would really improve everybody’s bottom line.
- Finally, the article highlights the interesting difference between the perceived role of government in Southern countries like Brazil compared to the North. According to the authors, while governments in other parts of the world have “surrendered the responsibility of governance to transnational and other corporations“, making “the use of law to protect and improve food systems and supplies, and thus public health” difficult, the Brazilian government still sees a safe and healthy food supply as one of its main priorities and responsibilities (I wrote about one of their nutrition programs in the very beginning of this blog). The reason for this shift might be their stronger commitment to the right to food as a human right (which was enshrined in the Brazilian constitution in 2010), as well as the strong pressure by militant civil society organizations.
Their conclusion sounds hopeful that governments might be able to retain control of the food system and encourage the use of the Brazilian example as one that “provides a basis for the design of rational, comprehensive, and effective public health policies and actions designed to protect and promote nutrition in all its senses.” On the other hand, I couldn’t help thinking back to this Al-Jazeera article about Mexico, which said that
The speed at which Mexicans have made the change from a diet dominated by maize and beans to one that bursts at the seams with processed fats and sugars poses one of the greatest challenges to public health officials. “No other country has grown like Mexico,” said Juan Rivera Dommarco, assistant director of the Centre of Investigation in Nutrition and Health at the National Institute of Public Health. “It has taken Mexico only 12 years or so to do what other countries needed 60 years for.”
Let’s hope Brazil doesn’t follow the same path.