Last month the UN Food and Agriculture Organization released its biennial State of Agricultural Commodity Markets report, and we were delighted to see it focusing on a topic close to our own hearts: policy coherence between trade and nutrition.
As the report makes clear, trade has many potential benefits for nutrition. At the country level, trade increases the diversity of foods available and/or extends their seasonality – particularly for small countries with natural resource constraints. Trade can help bridge nutrient gaps and enable countries to meet dietary needs; for example, trade in nutrients like B vitamins, calcium, and zinc has increased significantly in recent years. Trade also affects food prices, particularly those of staple foods, and lower import tariffs can help lower food prices and increase food access. Indeed, openness to trade may help reduce stunting (low height for age) in young children.
However, trade can also bring in more of the unhealthy foods that contribute to overweight, obesity, and non-communicable diseases – such as in some Pacific small island nations, where geographical constraints limit fresh food imports and a large share of imports are instead highly processed foods, many of which are high in fat, sugar, and/or salt. Policies can exacerbate this if they include a focus on excessively burdensome sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures [trade regulations designed to protect human, plant and animal health] that make it difficult to import fresh foods and/or easier to import processed, packaged ones.
So, how can we ensure that we are leveraging trade for the good it can do for reducing hunger and malnutrition, while avoiding the potential pitfalls? This requires food system policy coherence: the alignment of policies that affect the food system with the aim of achieving health, environmental, social, and economic goals, to ensure that policies designed to improve one food system outcome do not undermine others and, where possible, take advantage of synergies to achieve better outcomes for all.
In a partnership between GAIN and AKADEMIYA2063, we’ve been working over the past year to develop an easy-to-use tool to diagnose food systems policy coherence and provide actionable feedback to national-level stakeholders on how to promote more coherent approaches. We focus on the coherence of national policies with six near-universal goals of food systems, including zero hunger and healthy diets for all. Trade was central to our analysis, as one of six policy areas chosen for focus (alongside agriculture, health, environment, social affairs, and economic/industrial policy). Specifically, we examine the presence and level of tariffs on various more and less nutritious foods and the agricultural inputs used to produce them; we also consider export restrictions, discriminatory trade policies, and non-tariff measures applied to food, as well as nutrition labelling requirements that might be included in trade regulations.
We’ve so far piloted the tool in one country (Nigeria), and those preliminary results suggest that whereas trade policy is broadly coherent with Healthy Diets goals, trade is one of the main sectors where incoherence arises with the Zero Hunger goal. Trade policy documents were found to be consistent with greater consumption of nutritious foods and less unhealthy food consumption, supporting the Healthy Diets goal. For example, the inclusion of nutrition labelling in trade regulations was identified as an area of coherence (though the implementation of nutrition labelling to promote healthier food choices needs to be developed further in practice). However, when it came to increasing the supply and improving the affordability of staples (to contribute to achieving the Zero Hunger goal), several areas of incoherence arose with trade policy. For instance, we found evidence of tariffs and non-tariff measures that could adversely affect imports of staple crops or their inputs, potentially raising their prices. This contrasted with social affairs and health policies, which were largely coherent with both the Zero Hunger and Healthy Diets goals.
Policy coherence has emerged as a key element to ensure the effectiveness of policy for improved food systems performance. The GAIN-AKADEMIYA2063 tool can help users assess the coherence of policies and identify appropriate actions. We’ll be applying it in eight more countries in the coming months and look forward to learning and sharing more about nutrition-trade policy coherence and how it can be strengthened in the future to achieve zero hunger and healthy diets for all.