Unravelling the Food-Health Nexus, new report by IPES FOOD

On 9 October 2017, the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) and the Global Alliance for the future of Food presented, in the margins of the CFS44, a new report: Unravelling the Food-Health Nexus: Addressing Practices, Political Economy, and Power Relations to Build Healthier Food Systems. The report seeks to provide a comprehensive overview of these issues, identifying the channels through which food systems affect human health, and how prevailing power relations and imperatives in food systems help to shape our understanding of the impacts they generate.  The report shows how food systems affect health through multiple, interconnected pathways, generating severe humanand economic costs — and points to levers that can help to address the critical health issues and compounding factors that contribute to poor health, like climate change, poverty and inequality, and unsanitary conditions.

Unravelling the food-health nexus develops a holistic picture of food systems practices that lead to poor health — chemical intensive agriculture, intensive livestock production, mass production and mass marketing of ultra-processed foods, and the development of long and deregulated global commodity supply chains — and the outcomes these have: unhealthy working conditions; environmental contamination; contaminated food; unhealthy diets; and food insecurity.

“When health impacts are placed alongside social and environmental impacts, and the mounting costs they generate, the case for action is overwhelming. It is now clearer than ever that healthy people and a healthy planet are co-dependent”

Olivier De Schutter, IPES-Food co-chair and former UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food

@IPESfood report calls for #food systems approach to #health @RichardsonRuth @futureoffoodorg @UN_CFS #CFS44 pic.twitter.com/448z1ilUu6

— Faris Ahmed (@FarisAhmedUSC) October 9, 2017

Download report: English