Response to EAT-Lancet diet sets out 5 steps to repair food system

02 Sep 2020 --- Five main areas needed to ensure massive food systems overhaul have been flagged by new analysis published in Nature. Building upon the EAT-Lancet Commission report’s assertion that an “unprecedented level of global cooperation” is required to ensure a continually nutritious food supply, the authors detail that in addition to technological advancement, economics, politics, cultural norms, equity and governance are the key topics that “deserve more attention.”

Published early last year, the report by the EAT-Lancet Commission provided scientific targets for a healthy diet from a sustainable food production system, which spurred mixed responses from industry experts and academics.

Notably, the World Health Organization (WHO) pulled out of supporting the EAT-Lancet diet a few months later, having identified that such a diet could lead to the loss of millions of jobs linked to animal husbandry and destroy traditional diets linked to global and cultural heritages.

According to the new analysis, the EAT-Lancet report did “an excellent job of waking the world up” to the interlinked issues of health and environment and showed that diets are the common denominator. “Urgent action” in the fields of economics, politics and society is now required to fuse scientific findings with policymaking, which is where the analysis provides five steps to ensure a “great food transformation” becomes a reality.

The EAT-Lancet Commission report has spurred a debate on why food systems must transform, and why human and planetary health must be conjoined objectives.“Although we tacitly agreed that the EAT report was not perfect, we saw it as an opportunity to advance the debate on food system transformation and we were interested in its implementation and policy implications,” the new analysis’s lead author Christophe Béné tells NutritionInsight. He is also a Senior Policy Expert at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Colombia.

“In essence, we could say that the EAT report was an attempt to identify what needs to change. Now, the question is how to make this change happen. Our paper was a first attempt in that direction.”

Friend or foe?
The food industry may be part of the problem or part of the solution – or both, Béné argues. “My sense is that if the food industry was genuinely interested in contributing to improving the diets and health of people, it could have the central role and make a huge difference. Reality, however, suggests that people’s health and wellbeing is not the principal objective of the private sector,” he maintains.

In his view, policy and regulations need to be put in place to support those in the private sector who are willing to invest in healthier and more sustainable products and deter those who are only interested in skimming profit for their shareholders. 

Providing a five-pronged roadmap
Published in Nature Food, the analysis details five main areas that “deserve more attention.” Firstly, fixing food systems will incur not just economic and structural but also technological, social and institutional costs. In terms of a political economy, the status quo within the food system will have to be challenged. Too little public research and development funding in agriculture is being invested in non-staple, nutritious foods. Likewise, private finance and investments are often directed to profitability or efficiency, with insufficient incentives for production of nutritious food or sustainable practices.

Thirdly, the analysis argues that diversity of cultural norms needs to be taken into more serious consideration. Achieving sustainable food systems will also require substantial changes in the food habits of millions of people. These changes may conflict with or diverge substantially from current or even still-to-emerge cultural or social norms. Similarly, not everyone is contributing to and affected in the same way by the changes required to operationalize the transition. Therefore, more attention to issues of equity and social justice – the fourth point – is needed.

The aforementioned four distinct but closely related economic, political, cultural and social considerations create a complex space in which different actors interact with divergent or even competing interests, limited or lack of information, or with political attention turned to other important priorities, the analysis details. 

As the fifth area of consideration, effective governance and tools can ultimately support building the capacities of societies and decision-makers to identify, prioritize, evaluate and navigate tensions and trade-offs.

“The core of the challenge is not around nutrition. We now have a pretty good idea of what people need to eat to have a balanced diet and be healthy. This is not so much about the ‘what;’ the key question is about the ‘how.’ For the nutrition industry, the question is not: ‘What shall I produce?’ but rather, ‘Am I willing to produce it even if it means a reduction in my profit?’” Béné concludes.

By Anni Schleicher