This week it emerged that during 10 years of austerity, the height of UK children has fallen well behind global peers, with the average British boy and girl up to 5cm shorter than their European neighbours. Children’s height is used globally as a measure of health and wellbeing, and Britain has now dropped 30 places down the world rankings. This is on top of the fact that one in four British children are already obese – another marker of poor nutritional wellbeing often associated with poverty – by time they reach primary school.
In a timely report launched this week by the international Food Equity Centre, hosted by the UK based Institute of Development Studies (IDS), the experience of the UK shines a light on the root causes of poor diets, and nutritional outcomes such as obesity and poor child growth.
Historical injustices
Experts consulted this week on the UK figures said that “poor national diet and cuts to the NHS are to blame” linking the UK figures to the recent decade of austerity policies and broader social determinants such as poor housing, education and a lack of decent work. But the Food Equity Centre’s new report ‘Healthy Diets Depend on Equity and Justice: Understanding the Context in Brazil, South Africa, the UK, and Vietnam’ also highlights broader historical processes at play.
Some of these are present in the inequalities we see today: from seizing land used for small scale production from the UK’s poor rural communities in the 18th and 19th centuries, to seizing land and lives from many others under colonialism and slavery. The Food Equity Centre report argues that these factors need to be fully understood in explaining why poorer people face poorer outcomes; grow on average more than one cm shorter than their peers; or why rates of obesity and overweight are higher in marginalised communities, including those classed as Black Caribbean and Black African in the Millenium Cohort Study.
The research describes how high numbers of urban poor in the UK, created by both historical and contemporary processes, have led to a food system centred on cheap food at all costs. As the UK national food strategy illustrated, this cheap and often ultra-processed and unhealthy food does not factor in the full costs of its production (for instance environmental issues) or its consumption (such as the cost of health issues it creates).
Failing food systems globally
The UK is not the only country to experience these dietary and nutritional effects of poor food systems, of course. In the Food Equity Centre report, the UK case sits alongside studies from Brazil, South Africa and Vietnam – but every country on the planet has nutrition issues in some form or another. It is in this context that the Centre is moving forward based on ‘mutual learning’ between countries facing sometimes similar and sometimes different nutritional issues, but with a central common problem: a food system failing to deliver on healthy, sustainable food for all.
There are pockets of hope in every country, including the UK, but woe betide any researcher or practitioner from the UK now trying to lecture others on dietary equality following these findings. Our only hope is to come together to explore our problems and potential solutions collectively, thinking global and acting local.
In Vietnam, similarly historical processes of exclusion can explain why minoritized ethnicities fall behind their majority ethnicity peers in terms of child stunting, with recent government attention to the issue failing to incorporate the ideas of affected communities themselves.
In South Africa, the legacies of colonialism, apartheid and large-scale land dispossession go some way to explaining huge income and labour disparities which feed through into dietary adequacy and levels of child stunting and obesity. However, post-apartheid policies failing to tackle poor food environments driven by big food must take their share of blame too.
In Brazil, there have been advances and set-backs in tackling entrenched dietary inequality: the country is often celebrated as a success story in reducing inequalities in hunger and child stunting, improving rates of breastfeeding and bringing in a multifaceted strategy that tackled many of the social and food system determinants of malnutrition together. But as the report explains: spending and focus on these areas fell off a cliff in 2016 with a change of government in Brazil (now being revisited under the current Lula administration), and there has been a year-on-year increase in the consumption of unhealthy ultra-processed foods and rates of obesity are growing, affecting communities unequally.
Pathways to equitable food systems
This comparative paper is one of a series that has been published by the Food Equity Centre, alongside a new IDS report on Pathways to Equitable Food Systems, which draws on this and over a decade of work on food equity by IDS and partners. This new report outlines many of the same drivers of food system inequity: discrimination and marginalisation, dispossession, corporate concentration and lobbying, and a failure to diversify agricultural systems in the face of huge environmental costs.
But it also outlines a number of pathways forward to counter these power imbalances and build more equitable food systems that the support marginalised people, including bringing together community and government actions, pursuing multiple approaches rather than single initiatives, and paying much more attention to ensure any proposed solution explicitly support marginalised people.
Find out more about the Food Equity Centre’s work and watch the recording of the Pathways to Equitable Food Systems event here.
