|
|
|
Contact FAO Media Relations Office |
“Think big” to make global food trade work for nutrition
Institutions designed to boost food availability too often favour unhealthy foods, FAO’s Director-General says 08 May, 2018, Rome - Global trade in food is essential for all countries, but the world's trade and regulation
rulebook needs to be rebooted with an eye to bolstering trade in food that is healthy and nutritious rather than simply cheap, FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva said today.
Facilitating the export of commodities to feed the world was a postwar imperative whose relevance has changed as "commodities became a synonym of industrialized processed food" and the threat
of obesity is looming as large as that of hunger, he said. "Now things are changing completely." The popular farm-to-fork model of the food chain does not capture the complex realities of food systems, he said. "Most of the important things we do is beyond the fork."
Food's regulatory landscape, comprising laws, standards, production protocols, subsidies and disclosure protcocols, should be redesigned "to protect healthy food and not food in general," Graziano
da Silva said. "Promoting healthy food is part of FAO's mandate and I'd even call it an obligation." He spoke at the Rome presentation of the
2018 Global Food Policy Report, published by the
International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). This year's edition is focused on how to rein in growing discontent with globalization. "We must go beyond production," Shenggen Fan, Director-General of IFPRI, noting that key challenges in the pledge to end hunger include nutrition, employment, migration and the open sharing of
knowledge and data. "We need trade, as all countries, with no exception, need to exchange products to feed their population. The question is what kind of exchange," Graziano da Silva said.
Noting a proliferation of trading tensions regarding fresh produce in particular, he suggested that it was archaic to "apply the same regulation on a product export from Brazil to Japan to something
that is produced nearby to be sold in a farmer's market in the same city." As a result, mass-produced processed foods, often full of extra saturated fats, salt and sugar, are actually advantaged by current rules.
"To assure that future food systems will provide healthy food for all people we'll need a big change," Graziano da Silva said, noting that this would entail much work by standard-setting bodies
such as Codex Alimentarius. "We'll need to think big if we really want to make this change." The IFPRI report Trade has an essential role to play in pursuing the global goals of eradicating hunger, said IFPRI's Fan.
International trade increases food availability and can help increase food diversity, as when tropical fruits are sent to temperate-zone countries during the winter and cereals are sent the other
direction, he noted. Over the last 40 years, the worldwide share of food calories crossing international borders rose from about 12 percent to more than 19 percent, according to the report. Trade in food affects matters beyond calories and consumption. Fan cited the example of China's "virtual water" imports through food imports from Brazil, Canada and the United States, without
which China's own aquifers and rivers might be depleted. To make sure trade's positives outweigh potential negatives, it is important to create an environment that is inclusive, particularly for the world's smallholders, he said.
|
|
|
read this story online | Journalists & editors: This news release was issued by the Media Office at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). To unsubscribe
from this news service click the link below or send an email to
[log in to unmask] with "signoff Media-G-Eng-L" as the only text in the message body. You can also manage your subscription online,
here. To receive news releases in plain text format rather than HTML, contact us.
|
To unsubscribe from the Media-G-Eng-L list, click the following link:
&*TICKET_URL(Media-G-Eng-L,SIGNOFF);