AGENT PROVOCATEUR
Chronic diseases are the real pandemic: Join the healthy food movement Coast Sullenger
The risk of worldwide famine as a result of COVID-19, particularly amongst vulnerable populations in the developing world, is now almost a certainty. (Photo: WFP)
Once COVID-19 passes, the world will face the urgent global challenges of climate change, widespread economic malfunction and the threat of new pandemics crossing from animal sources to humans. Geneva-based investment advisor Coast Sullenger argues in our Oped Section "Agent Provocateur" that there’s an even more fundamental dilemma we need to tackle: our unhealthy food habits and ‘industrialized diets’. THIS IS HOW THE CLERGYMAN THOMAS MALTHUS SAW our inevitable future in the 18th century when population expands beyond the capacity of the planet to sustain it: “Epidemics, pestilence and plague advance in terrific array, with famine following, to complete the great work of extermination.” Thanks to technology and medicine, the global population has grown far beyond what Malthus would have ever thought possible (7.8 billion today) and there is enough food to keep everyone alive, even though there is much waste and it is still poorly distributed. But around the time of the last financial crisis in 2008, the prices of food staples like wheat, corn, and rice shot up so high that nearly 500 million people on earth were pushed into poverty and malnutrition. Somehow, Malthus’s pessimistic vision lives on, and keeps resurfacing. How can we finally prove him wrong?
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MOVING BEYOND THE PANDEMIC: THE RISK OF FAMINE In a world now destabilized by pandemic, the WHO and some other organizations now warn that another 150200 million poor people risk imminent famine. And what about over 2 billion people on our planet who now suffer from obesity, and the many more who now suffer chronic diseases due to poor diets? We urgently need to make changes in our food and agricultural systems, I argue, in order to avoid catastrophe. We have been consuming ever more scarce resources as the world population increases. Our societal model is extractive and not regenerative, competitive and not cooperative. So we continue to deplete the earth’s riches, exacerbating the disharmony with nature. Take the case of nitrogen and carbon, both vital
