Food and Agriculture Organisation calls for trade to prioritise healthy foods

Director-general of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) José Graziano da Silva has suggested that the world trade ‘rulebook’ needs to be reformed to incorporate healthy food.

The director-general, who presented the FAO’s 2018 Global Food Policy Report in Rome on Monday, said that institutions designed to boost food availability currently prioritise cheaper, unhealthy food products over healthier alternatives.

Chapter three of the report, titled ‘The Free Flow of Goods and Food Security and Nutrition’, said: “Trade allows year-round consumption of many healthy products, such as fruits and vegetables, and gives access to non-traditional food items that have improved nutrition—for example, allowing East Asian countries to rapidly integrate more milk into their diets; consumers in developed and emerging economies to adopt olive oil, a healthy source of unsaturated fat; and markets to expand for lesser-known nutritious crops such as quinoa.”

Graziano da Silva said that while facilitating food exports was imperative to the post-war world, ‘commodities became a synonym of industrialised processed food’ and the new threat of global obesity is equal to global hunger.

The report, published by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), focused on how to counter growing discontent with globalisation.

IFPRI director-general Shenggen Fan argued that the growing trend towards protectionism, evidenced by the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change and the UK’s departure from the EU, was creating uncertainty for global food security and nutrition.

Fan noted that nutrition, employment, migration and transparency were all important challenges that would need to be addressed in order to end hunger. He added that trade was still key to solving global food insecurity.

IFPRI senior research fellows Will Martin and David Laborde, who co-authored chapter three of the report, wrote: “Opening to trade has important implications for incomes, food consumption, nutritional outcomes, and resource use. By encouraging production in areas with a comparative advantage in agriculture, trade raises countries’ incomes and provides access to better prices on world markets.”

The report said that in the last 40 years the worldwide share of food calories crossing national borders rose from 12% to 19%.

Graziano da Silva added: “We need trade, as all countries, with no exception, need to exchange products to feed their population. The question is what kind of exchange. To assure that future food systems will provide healthy food for all people, we’ll need a big change. We’ll need to think big if we really want to make this change.”