"As the US and European Union remained locked in a battle over certification, the fact remains that more and more such unwanted and unhealthy foods are being dumped all over."

Wide ranging article from the New Delhi-based food policy analyst Devinder Sharma.
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Is industrially produced food the new killer?
By Devinder Sharma

The world is fast becoming fat, obese and rotund. And so are the hungry and impoverished. If nutritionists are to be believed, more and more slum dwellers in New Delhi, Mumbai and elsewhere are fast adding on unwanted body fats. Resulting obesity is turning into a major killer – topping the global chart.

As if this is not enough, the US President George Bush has announced that the United States is rapidly outsourcing obesity to India. Speaking sometimes back before the US Chamber of Commerce, Bush said that since most of the millions of jobs outsourced were to India since he first became the President, "These jobs are now making the people of India fat instead of us."

America hopes to shed some three trillion pounds of unsightly cellulite every year through outsourcing. Since the call centre jobs are sedentary, workers are fast putting on weight. One reason is that the BPO industry has provided enough space for the fast food joints thereby providing the workers with the limited choice of eating junk foods to fill their hungry stomachs. In the long run, therefore, the fast growing BPO industry will create a health epidemic in India.

At the same time, genetically modified food with no visible advantages for the consumers is being marketed with impunity. Between 2001 and 2004, the Swiss multinational Syngenta released about 700 tons of the illegal seeds into the US market by mistake, enough to produce about 150,000 tons of corn. This new corn variety contained a gene that makes it resistant to the antibiotic Ampicillin. It is widely feared that if humans consume animals fed with the corn, they could develop immunities to antibiotics.

As the US and European Union remained locked in a battle over certification, the fact remains that more and more such unwanted and unhealthy foods are being dumped all over. In 2001, a similar mishap from Starlink had cost the US economy over a billion dollars. In any case what is being marketed as ‘substantially equivalent’ is something that brings no gains to the average consumers. It only helps the biotech seed companies garner more profits from its cultivation. Since what is grown has to ultimately enter the food chain, scientists are being used to justify the need to have such crops and then pronounce these foods as safe.

For almost three decades in a row, the global food industry grew at a phenomenal rate with the promise of feeding the upwardly mobile population with tasty and cheap fast foods. The educated and the rich first latched on to the attractively packed and quickly delivered food products. By the time they realized that the industrially produced foods were unhealthy and in reality a killer, the habit had grown. The industry meanwhile grew in size and moved across shores using the power of advertisement to lure the gullible consumers. The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), which is always eager to promote unwanted technologies so as to promote the commercial interests of the agribusiness companies and that too in the name of hunger and malnutrition, turned a blind eye to the unhealthy food trends and for obvious reasons.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) too belatedly reports that more than 1.2 billion people, about one-sixth of the global population, are now overweight. Ironically, the number of fat people far exceed the number of absolute hungry – some 840 million people go to bed with empty stomach. The only redeeming feature being while a majority of the obese are in the developed countries, almost the entire population of hungry live in the Third World countries. So far only 115 million people in the Third World are reportedly obese and the faulty eating habits have induced a rise in heart and diabetes-related problems.

The worst affected is of course America. With its heavily subsidized food supply chain, receiving enormous subsidies at the time of production and processing, food was never so cheap. Backed by media blitz, Americans devoured everything that was put on the market. The result: obesity has now become the major killer in the United States, leaving cigarette smoking far behind. Some 400,000 people die every year from obesity-related ailments. More and more agile activists and affected people are now moving the courts to stop the food industry from killing people and also to seek adequate compensation.

In China, a country that was battling malnutrition all these years, reports now indicate that over 22 per cent of Chinese are obese, and the rate of fattening is rising faster. In India, a study conducted by the All India Institute for Medical Studies (AIIMS) reveals that 27 per cent of school children are obese. Another study by the Centre for Obesity Research (COR), Kanpur, shows that between 1998 and 2003, India spent Rs 3,750 billion on treating obesity-related problems, with tax-payers picking up the tab for half the amount. This is because urban India, which may be only five percent of the country’s population, consumes 40 per cent of the country’s available fat.

Obesity is fast growing in eastern European countries, where obesity rates have tripled in last 25 years. In Australia, some 20 per cent of the school children and adolescents are obese and over-weight. In Middle East, the obesity ratio has reached 60 per cent. In Japan, where people were traditionally thinner and short, reports show that men between the age of 20 and 60 are getting fatter at an alarming rate.

The alarming trend is therefore something that the consumers as well as the governments need to worry about. As the British Food Standards Agency pointed out recently, if obesity continues to grow at the present rate, today’s young people will not be able to live as long as their parents. And yet, when the WHO earlier this year came out with a report chastising the sugar industry for being responsible for growing diabetes, and therefore calling for a reduction in sugar consumption, the industry reacted and forced the international agency to withdraw its report.

At the same time, worried at the rising anger among the consumers, the American food industry has come together to prepare a joint front against the spate of legal suits being filed. Nor has the industry allowed the governments to clamp moratorium on advertisements on the small screen. The recent softening of the Indian government's stand against the soft drink industry is a pointer to who decides as to what we should eat and drink. The relentless expansion of McDonald’s and Wimpy’s to the remote corners of the developing world is an indication of the impact of media backup to unhealthy foods.

This brings us to the more fundamental question. It is often been said that the consumer is the best judge of the market economy and therefore he or she makes decisions that are best required. The food industry therefore pleases the consumers by repeatedly saying that consumer is the king. In reality, the consumer is simply stupid.

Take the case of cigarettes. It has been clearly written on the cigarette packs that smoking is injurious to health, and yet the educated went on smoking as if there was no tomorrow. How can the consumers be considered wise if the sales of cigarettes continued to soar despite the loud warning? Similarly, after the damage already done by the food industry, no questions are being asked about the newly introduced genetically modified food products. If the consumers were never discerning enough to find out how the fast foods were detrimental to their health, they are not making any effort to question the nutritional and human health value of the genetically-modified foods that have suddenly appeared on the market shelves.

After all, what benefit does a consumer have by eating a soybean that has a gene for herbicides? When will the consumer begin to ask these simple questions? What benefit does the average consumer in India have when the industry provides them with cotton seed oil for cooking that contains a bacterial gene for toxicity? How long will the consumers allow the food industry to poison them? When will the consumers begin to question the nutritional safety of food products that are being forced down their throat?

Regardless of what GM food means for human health, a Japanese-US study published by the annals of the American Academy of Sciences has recently concluded that beef and milk from cloned cattle is similar to that produced by normal animals. "We conclude that most parameters of the composition of meat and milk from somatic animal clones were not significantly different from those of the genetically modified animals," the study had concluded. If that be so, what is wrong with the beef and milk from ordinary cattle? Why should the consumers opt for milk and meat from genetically modified cattle? Why is the industry producing these genetically modified cattle when the normal cattle are no less inferior?

Failure to ask these questions is resulting in the death of hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. These are unwanted deaths. These deaths are the not the outcome of poverty and hunger. The industrial food epidemic affects first the rich and educated. Their only fault being that they have been eating whatever came their way. Like cattle, they are being very conveniently led to a slaughter house.

Food produced industrially is now becoming a major killer. Obesity related deaths have now reached an epidemic proportion. Who will bell the cat?

(Devinder Sharma is a New Delhi-based food policy analyst. Responses can be emailed at [email protected])

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