Equity and expertise in the UN Food Systems Summit

Abstract

The UN Food Systems Summit is bold but controversial, with important implications for global food systems and public health. Alongside claims of corporate capture, many have noted insufficient attention paid to human rights and to rebalancing power in the food system. These issues speak to wider issues of participation and equity in the summit itself. Narrow definitions of equity only consider income inequities in outcomes and coverage. Broader definitions consider why such inequities persevere and are interlinked via process-es that can be historical and intergenerational. The summit’s science group is slanted in disciplinary expertise: it lacks sufficient expertise in equity, health, noncommunicable diseases or representatives with expertise in indigenous knowledge. It is not too late to rectify this in the summit structures, as we approach the September summit meeting.

Full text

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NisbettN, etal. BMJ Global Health 2021;6:e006569. doi:10.1136/bmjgh-2021-006569
Equity and expertise in the UN Food
Systems Summit
Nicholas Nisbett ,1 Sharon Friel ,2 Richmond Aryeetey ,3
Fabio da Silva Gomes,4 Jody Harris ,1,5 Kathryn Backholer ,6
Phillip Baker ,7 Valarie Blue Bird Jernigan ,8 Sirinya Phulkerd 9
Commentary
To cite: NisbettN, FrielS,
AryeeteyR, etal. Equity
and expertise in the UN
Food Systems Summit.
BMJ Global Health
2021;6:e006569. doi:10.1136/
bmjgh-2021-006569
Received 9 June 2021
Accepted 11 June 2021
For numbered afliations see
end of article.
Correspondence to
Dr Nicholas Nisbett;
N. Nisbett@ ids. ac. uk
© Author(s) (or their
employer(s)) 2021. Re- use
permitted under CC BY- NC. No
commercial re- use. See rights
and permissions. Published by
BMJ.
The UN Food Systems Summit is expected to
launch bold new actions, solutions and strat-
egies to deliver progress on all 17 sustainable
development goals (SDGs), each of which
requires a transformation in the way the
world produces, consumes and thinks about
food. However, the summit preparations
have started controversially, with claims of
corporate capture by prominent civil society
groups,1 who, alongside the current and two
former UN Special Rapporteurs on the Right
to Food,2 have also noted insufficient atten-
tion paid to human rights and to rebalancing
power in the food system itself.
The issue of corporate capture is an
important one for the summit. Early decisions
to implement a clear set of rules on corporate
participation and transparency were missed
and need rectifying urgently for the summit
to continue with any legitimacy, as the UN
Special Rapporteurs and the scientists of a
new boycott3 have pointed out. The summit
has embraced the (contested,4 some would
argue failed)5 principle of ‘multistakeholder
inclusivity’ as essential for the summit to be
a ‘safe space’ for all actors, but with little
regards to how power asymmetries between
stakeholders within the summit itself must
be acknowledged, addressed and accounted
for transparently; not a helpful precedent for
a global architecture to address those same
power asymmetries.
Closely linked to these issues have been
the role of right- based and equity- based
approaches within the summit; and how far
the summit’s ‘forum’ shifts away from the
UN Committee on Food Security, where
these issues have a strong mandate, risks
diluting hard won battles for a fairer, more
just and right- based food system.5 The
summit hopes to contribute to the promise
global leaders signed at the SDG summit
to ‘leave no one behind’. Equity is, there-
fore, at the heart of the summit. However,
without advancing both a stronger norma-
tive and multidisciplinary understanding
of equity, the summit process risks missing
a once in a generation chance to refocus
understanding and action on food system
inequity. Attention ought to be drawn not
only to the current inequitable experiences
and outcomes facing people within food
systems but also to the reasons why such
inequities in outcomes persevere (eg, non-
white households were two times as likely to
face food insecurity during the COVID-19
pandemic compared with white British
households; and those with disability or
health problems, three times more likely).6
We wonder what egregious failings of polit-
ical systems are being glossed over in ‘leave
no one behind’ if such virtuous aspiration
leads to a failure to ask questions of why so
many people, for so long, have been ‘held
back’.
The problem is partly with the concept of
equity itself: incontrovertibly, a good thing
Summary box
►The UN Food Systems Summit is bold but contro-
versial, with important implications for global food
systems and public health.
►Alongside claims of corporate capture, many have
noted insufcient attention paid to human rights and
to rebalancing power in the food system.
►These issues speak to wider issues of participation
and equity in the summit itself. Narrow denitions of
equity only consider income inequities in outcomes
and coverage. Broader denitions consider why such
inequities persevere and are interlinked via process-
es that can be historical and intergenerational.
►The summit’s science group is slanted in disciplinary
expertise: it lacks sufcient expertise in equity,
health, noncommunicable diseases or representa-
tives with expertise in indigenous knowledge.
►It is not too late to rectify this in the summit struc-
tures, as we approach the September summit
meeting.
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2NisbettN, etal. BMJ Global Health 2021;6:e006569. doi:10.1136/bmjgh-2021-006569
BMJ Global Health
to pursue, but variously defined. For example, among
experts on chronic undernutrition, equity is often concep-
tualised as diverging coverage of health interventions or
outcomes differing by socioeconomic groups.7 Among
experts on health equity and diet- related noncommu-
nicable diseases, however, equity often also refers more
to the structural, social and commercial determinants of
health and the concentration of power among private
sector interests.8
Summit participants are tasked with proposing and
prioritising a set of ‘game changing solutions’ for
member states to adopt. To some equity experts, such
solutions might mean providing significantly scaled up
child and maternal health services, particularly targeted
at marginalised communities; or similar access to systems
of social protection or food assistance. Equity to others
might also mean finding ways to tackle historical injus-
tices that still shape people’s lives. For example, dispos-
sessing communities, particularly indigenous peoples,
from ancestral lands—and the culinary and agroecolog-
ical skills and knowledge that adhere to those territo-
ries—has been devastating to local food systems. Public
health then comes to mean something quite different:
regaining sovereignty and control over land and food as
part of wider self- determination; working to preserve or
return to traditional and healthy foods and associated
culinary practices against a tidal wave of ultraprocessed,
nontraditional and unhealthy products.9
Separate (but in our view, still complementary) under-
standings of equity also reflect the siloed and hierar-
chical knowledge systems that still frame the UN system
and similar international architectures. Tackling growing
uncertainties that range from pandemics, to climate
change, to intractable historical food- based problems
‘require a fundamental rethinking of how expertise
of multiple sorts and new forms of professionalism are
convened and combined’.10 11 The scientific committee
of the UNFSS is dominated by agricultural economists
and natural scientists: great scholars, but a missed oppor-
tunity to encounter knowledge not only from experts in
health equity or gender and rights but also from indige-
nous and other traditional people (not those speaking
for them), food workers and others with lived experi-
ence of malnutrition and diet- related diseases. We do
see these voices represented elsewhere in the summit
(sometimes marginally), but the summit’s approach to
filling its scientific committee feels outdated for a summit
concerned with food systems, when most systems experts
already recognise the need for this diversity of knowledge
and experience.
The structure of the summit itself also adds another
layer of inequity and imbalance of power. There are
many ways to get involved in the summit, and in principle
this is positive. But Member States or civil society organ-
isation with limited resources will not be able to become
a Food Systems Hero, help to raise awareness of food
systems on social media, host or join a Dialogue and also
participate and follow all five Action Tracks. Those with
greater resources, and their propositions, will then reign.
For this reason, the myriad of participation mechanisms
is not as important as how this will be weighed into deci-
sions; to return to the initial concerns with the summit,
how will the power of those actors opposing healthier,
more sustainable and more equitable food systems be
constrained?
As we write in June, ahead of a September Summit,
time is not late to take action in rebalancing powers and
enabling a greater diversity of knowledge, not simply
among a multiplicity of voices in multiple public forums,
but explicitly engaged at the summit’s top table of exper-
tise and summit leadership. It is also not late to adopt
mechanisms that limit the engagement of those actors
whose primary interests have driven our food systems to
become unhealthy, unsustainable and inequitable, so the
voices of the people can be clearly heard. Doing so would
help meet the need for putting equity- focused action at
the heart of the summit in a way that accords with the
existing UN legal framework on rights and the SDGs; and
with the multiple traditions of equity, we argue, need to
be embraced for the summit to be a success on its own
terms.
Author afliations
1Health and Nutrition Research Cluster, Institute of Development Studies at the
University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
2Menzies Centre for Health Governance, School of Regulation and Global
Governance, Australian National University, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory,
Australia
3School of Public Health, University of Ghana, Accra, Ghana
4Pan American Health Organization, Washington, District of Columbia, USA
5Healthy Diets Flagship, World Vegetable Centre, Bangkok, Thailand
6Institute for Health Transformation, Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria, Australia
7Institute for Physical Activity and Nutrition, Deakin University, Melbourne, Victoria,
Australia
8Center for Indigenous Health Research and Policy, Oklahoma State University,
Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA
9Institute for Population and Social Research, Mahidol University, Nakhon Pathom,
Thailand
Twitter Phillip Baker @philbakernz
Contributors All authors contributed to this commentary.
Funding The authors have not declared a specic grant for this research from any
funding agency in the public, commercial or not- for- prot sectors.
Competing interests Nicholas Nisbett is a member of the UNFSS Action Track 4
Leadership Group. Dr. Nisbett declares previous funding from the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation, India; the International Food Policy Research Institute and UK
Research and Innovation. Dr Backholer declares previous funding from the National
Heart Foundation of Australia. The views expressed here are that of the authors
alone.
Patient consent for publication Not required.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
Data availability statement All data relevant to the study are included in the
article.
Open access This is an open access article distributed in accordance with
the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY- NC 4.0) license,
which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-
commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the
original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made
indicated, and the use is non- commercial. See:http:// creativecommons. org/
licenses/ by- nc/ 4. 0/.
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NisbettN, etal. BMJ Global Health 2021;6:e006569. doi:10.1136/bmjgh-2021-006569 3
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ORCID iDs
NicholasNisbett http:// orcid. org/ 0000- 0002- 9558- 2263
SharonFriel http:// orcid. org/ 0000- 0002- 8345- 5435
RichmondAryeetey http:// orcid. org/ 0000- 0003- 4667- 592X
JodyHarris http:// orcid. org/ 0000- 0002- 3369- 1253
KathrynBackholer http:// orcid. org/ 0000- 0002- 3323- 575X
PhillipBaker http:// orcid. org/ 0000- 0002- 0802- 2349
ValarieBlue Bird Jernigan http:// orcid. org/ 0000- 0002- 3965- 8518
SirinyaPhulkerd http:// orcid. org/ 0000- 0001- 9373- 3120
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