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For that reason, researchers decided to work on a second version of the EAT-Lancet Commission, an ambitious report that in 2019 created the first assessment of what food systems should look like in order to promote human health without destroying Earth.
The next report, called the EAT Lancet 2.0 that launched at the Stockholm+50 conference earlier this month, will expand on the previous version’s goal of creating resilient food systems in the face of pollution, climate change, pandemics, and armed conflicts. The work of the commission provides a scientific target for global food systems—specifically diets and farming—that can help countries achieve sustainable development goals and keep carbon emissions under the limits established by the Paris Agreement.
The new report will update numbers on the food system’s impacts on biodiversity, the impacts of pollutants—including pesticides, herbicides, and microplastics – in the marine ecosystem, and what a transition to a healthy diet for humans looks like. Unlike the first report, these suggestions will take into account culinary traditions, cultural differences, and environmental justice.
There is an “urgent need to put the science in front of all the decision makers on the safe boundaries of the food system,” said Johan Rockstrom at the conference. Rockstrom is director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and professor in Earth System Science at the University of Potsdam and environmental science at the Stockholm Resilience Center and one of the co-chairs of the EAT-Lancet commission.
Planetary boundaries
It’s hard to give a clear, actionable path toward a sustainable food system. There’s no “1.5-degree target” for food systems, like the one included in the Paris Agreement for global temperatures, and mechanisms like an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) don’t exist for all the actors and sectors engaged in the global food system. In 2019, researchers from all over the world created the EAT-Lancet Commission to address this.
Leading scientists in nutrition, food science, agriculture, economics, and social science came together to figure out the impacts of current food systems on Earth’s planetary boundaries, which are global thresholds of nine biophysical processes of the Earth (things like ocean acidity, the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or the nitrogen cycle) that should not be exceeded so humanity can thrive and ecosystems can be preserved. The goal was to figure out what kind of human diet could keep us within these limits.
The initial report from the EAT-Lancet Commission on food, planet, health showed that four of nine planetary boundaries had been crossed because of human activity. Rockstrom said at the conference earlier this month that growing evidence shows the situation has become more severe—an article published in Nature in April 2022 suggests that a sixth planetary boundary has now been crossed.
“We continue to move in the wrong direction,” Rockstrom said, even as humanity enters the “most decisive decade” for its future. “The food system is the single largest economic sector causing the transgressing of planetary boundaries,” he added.
Including pollution, biodiversity, and equity
The beneficial impacts of healthy diets on human and planetary health could be significant, according to the commission’s first report. They found that feeding 10 billion people healthy diets within sustainable limits—that includes plant-based foods and low amounts of meat and highly processed foods—is not only possible, but can help prevent more than 11 million premature adult deaths per year.
The next report is expected in 2024, and it’ll include key changes. First, it’ll quantify the impacts of food systems on biodiversity—not just species extinction, but how food systems are threatening the stability of big ecosystems including the Amazon rainforest and wetlands, grasslands, and savannah systems.
The biodiversity lens will expand to the commission’s recommendations, as this time the report will not just consider the quantity of food available, but its quality and diversity, including its nutrient quality and its safety, said Shakuntala Thilsted at the conference. Thilsted is the Global Lead for Nutrition and Public Health at WorldFish and co-chair of the EAT-Lancet Commission.
Additionally, it’ll include the impacts of pollutants including pesticides, herbicides, and microplastics in the marine system, which was missing in the first report due to data availability, Rockstrom said.
Crucially, the next report will integrate the scientific consensus reached by the commission with dietary traditions of countries around the world. Thilstead said that the commission will invite new discussions regarding social justice and equity to ensure diverse, healthy, and sustainable diets for all people, including the poor and the vulnerable.
Including these two aspects could strengthen the reach of the report and acceptance of the commission, she added. The goal, she said, is to “leave no one behind.”
This impact on global life expectancy is comparable to the impact of smoking, six times higher than that of HIV/AIDS, more than three times that of alcohol use and unsafe water, and 89 times that of conflict and terrorism, according to the Air Quality Life Index report, produced by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago.
“Air pollution can be difficult to raise the alarm about because it is something we experience every day,” Christa Hasenkopf, director of the Air Quality Life Index program, told EHN. “It can be hard to recognize compared to other threats that pose smaller burdens but are more visible.”
Research has increasingly shown that air pollution, even at very low levels, harms human health. This year the World Health Organization (WHO) lowered its threshold for safe exposure to PM2.5 (particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns in diameter — hundreds of times smaller than a grain of salt) from an annual average of 10 micrograms per cubic meter to 5 micrograms per cubic meter. Following that change, most of the world — 97.3% of the global population — experiences a level of air pollution exposure that’s considered unsafe.
Sources of PM2.5 pollution include car exhaust, industrial emissions and the burning of fossil fuels. Exposure to PM2.5 pollution is linked to asthma and respiratory disease, heart problems, high blood pressure, cancer, central nervous system disorders like epilepsy and autism, and mental illness.
The new report notes that despite the slowdown of the global economy during the pandemic, the global annual average for PM2.5 pollution stayed largely the same in 2019 and 2020.
The Air Quality Life Index estimated the impacts of 2020 levels of air pollution across the globe relative to a world that met the new WHO threshold. The Index references two studies out of China that found for every additional 10 micrograms per cubic meter of PM2.5 pollution a person is exposed to, their life expectancy is reduced by 0.64 years, and combined that analysis with global pollution data to estimate the impact of exposure to PM2.5 pollution on life expectancy.
“We made the Index to make the health impacts and costs of air pollution more visible,” Hasenkopf said. “Air pollution is one of the largest public health threats of our time, but it’s highly neglected. The good news is that it’s also entirely solvable if we turn our attention to it.”
Industry, wildfires drive US hotspots for PM2.5
Wildfire near Ukiah, California, in 2018. (Credit: Bob Dass/flickr)
Under the new WHO guidelines, almost all of the United States — 92.8% of the population, up from just 7.6% under the previous threshold — are exposed to unsafe levels of PM2.5 pollution. As a result of the Clean Air Act, overall air pollution levels are significantly better in the U.S. than much of the rest of the world, but in some highly polluted places life expectancy is lower than in others.
In Pittsburgh, for example, none of the surrounding county’s seven air monitors have ever detected an annual average for PM2.5 below the WHO’s new threshold of 5 micrograms per cubic meter. In 2020, the air monitor in one of the region’s most polluted neighborhoods showed an annual average of 9.8 micrograms per cubic meter for PM2.5. If levels stayed below the new WHO threshold instead of at that level moving forward, residents would gain six months of average lifespan, according to Hasenkopf. The three-year average for the same monitor from 2017-2019 was 12.4 micrograms per cubic meter. If pollution levels stayed below the new WHO threshold instead of that level, residents would gain about nine months of average lifespan.
In California’s Central Valley, wildfires driven by climate change have caused spikes in air pollution in recent years. In 2020, average pollution concentrations ranged from 13 micrograms per cubic meter in Sierra County to 22.6 in Mariposa County, where residents could gain 1.7 years of life expectancy if PM2.5 stayed below the WHO guideline permanently rather than staying at 2020 levels, according to the report.
Some regions fare worse than others
In some parts of the world, air pollution lowers life expectancy significantly more than the global average.
In South Asia, for example, residents are expected to lose an average of about five years of their lives to air pollution if current levels persist. In regions where PM2.5 pollution is particularly high, the cost is even higher: In Bangladesh residents lose nearly seven years of life to air pollution.
Almost all of Central and West Africa (about 97%) is considered unsafe by the WHO’s new PM2.5 threshold, and in some of the most polluted regions, average life expectancy is reduced by up to five years. This means that air pollution is as much of a health threat as HIV/AIDS and malaria in these areas, and could surpass the impact of those diseases if fossil fuel growth continues at its current pace in these regions. Other sources of PM2.5 contributing to pollution in these regions include waste burning, mining, mineral processing, cement manufacturing, high sulfur content fuel, industrial emissions, oil refineries and the use of diesel generators, according to the report.
Banner photo: Scotland activists gather in 2015 to demand clean air as Edinburgh Air Pollution Zone to be expanded. (Credit: Friends of the Earth Scotland)
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Environmental impact
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2021 was a year of excitement and challenge for our small nonprofit.
- We launched EHN en Español,
- Doubled down on our commitment to the groundbreaking early career science program Agents of Change, and
- Saw significant gains on both the toxics and climate fronts.
And we watched readers – like you! – get engaged in ways that continually surprised us.
Our work continues
Photo by Jamie Coupaud on Unsplash
In just the first three months this year EHS staff has been a hive of activity:
- Partnered with wellness community Mamavation.com to investigate PFAS contamination in sports bras, cosmetics and other products.
- Driven a global campaign around groundbreaking BPA limits in Europe – and why the same scientific standards should be applied in the U.S.
- Published 10 Agents of Change essays & podcasts exploring everything from new pathways into science to workplace chemical exposures.
Take a look at the work EHS did last year and be proud that you, as a reader, are moving it forward.
We certainly are grateful to you!
PS: Just this week we published a look at impacts one year after "Fractured," our groundbreaking investigation into spillover pollution from fracking fields in Southwestern Pennsylvania. Check it out!
Banner photo art by David Ryder for EHN.org
Equal space and weight are often given to stops along the way, including food processing, transportation, and retail. The diagrams also typically float aloof in space—unattached to any legal system, economy, or private entity. Despite their alluring simplicity, these characterizations fail to capture true imbalances of power and responsibility in food production, standing in stark contrast to modern food industry realities.
Large-scale food and beverage companies, engaged in processing and manufacturing raw agricultural materials for profit in global markets, are not just another step in the food system path. They play an outsized role in driving disparities in human health and environmental sustainability.
Source: USDA, 2021
Food processing companies currently make one fourth of every dollar spent on groceries in the U.S., with just a handful of companies controlling as much as 98.4% of the market share in some categories of prepared foods. By comparison, the country’s more than 2.5 million farmworkers, the majority of which are undocumented and unprotected by fair wage laws, get just eight cents for every dollar spent on groceries.
Food processing companies like Nestlé (Switzerland), Coca Cola (U.S.), Danone (France), and Unilever (United Kingdom/Netherlands) are bottlenecks in the global food system, exerting undue influence over both what and how much is produced by farmers upstream as well as what and how much is eaten by consumers downstream.
As Jeffrey Sachs poignantly pointed out prior to the United Nations’ recent Food Systems Summit, “We have a world food system. It is based on large multi-national companies; it is based on private profits; and it is based on a radical denial of the rights of poor people.”
Pressure on farms
Despite this concentration of power and wealth, international agendas for public health and sustainable food production often call for reform not by the most powerful food companies but, instead, by farmers and consumers.
The agricultural sector—a diverse set of small-, medium-, and large-scale producers found around the world—is widely criticized for greenhouse gas emissions, land deterioration, and water use. Little is mentioned, however, about the artificial demand created by food processing companies for derivatives of farmers’ crops and livestock, including refined sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, and animal-sourced meats and fats. By encouraging overeating in their meals and product formulations, fast food companies and food processors create excess consumer demand, putting undue pressure on farms to supply massive quantities of cheap, unsustainably produced foods.
Far from determining the ultimate use of the whole seeds, grains, vegetables, and legumes they produce, farmers are increasingly trapped in cycles of dependence—relying on expensive and contractually bound use of pesticides and fertilizers to increase yields and compete in the global market. Their lands and production capacities are consequently degraded, creating new economic pressures and driving increased rates of suicide, all to meet food processing companies’ ever-heightening demands.
Blaming the consumer
Instead of accountability, a U.N. business declaration called for food processing companies to “incentivize consumers as agents of change to create demand for sustainably produced, high quality healthy and nutritious diets.” Efforts such as Meatless Mondays, public education campaigns, and by-the-pound meat taxes on consumer purchases are often proposed as solutions to the bad behavior of individual consumers, who are purportedly “at the end of the supply chain [and] arguably in the best position to drive positive change along its entirety," wrote the authors of a 2020 article in Nature.
But changing consumer behavior is not a panacea. Efforts to shift diets not only face deep-rooted and reasonably held cultural norms, they must also come to terms with worsening food environments; poor purchasing power for healthier food alternatives like whole fruits, legumes, and vegetables; and an outcry against colonialism in the face of efforts to veganize already malnourished, protein-poor diets in low- and middle-income countries.
Despite these ethical concerns, many in the academic community continue to promote these and other small-scale interventions (urban agriculture is another example), which fail to reflect the lived realities of impoverished households and allow food processing companies to evade their own responsibilities—including their disproportionate influence over millions of diets around the world.
Although we’d like to believe that all food options are equally accessible, global food environments are being increasingly monopolized by large and highly consolidated food and beverage companies, each flooding grocery aisles with addictive products, employing aggressive marketing strategies, and, ultimately, driving excess consumption and diet-related chronic disease.
As outlined by Consumer International, “Many of the approaches for achieving the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals and climate targets rely heavily on consumers making different purchasing choices, or modifying their usage of goods or products and services. But this is not a fair responsibility to place on consumers where the current structure of the marketplace favors unsustainable options.”
Holding food processing companies accountable
Public health researchers must recognize the responsibility food processing companies have to reduce the health and environmental costs of their products. Efforts such as the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment and the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network’s Four Pillar Framework fill this gap in advocacy and provide clear and practical guidance on corporate alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals in the food industry, outlining specific responsibilities held by the private sector to remedy past harms and modify business strategies to more ethically and sustainably produce healthy foods. As the bottleneck of power and wealth concentration in the food supply chain, the food processing industry is a far more effective and efficient target of reform than the diverse hundreds of millions of global consumers and farmers at opposite ends of the food system.
Research and policy must identify how food processing companies can mitigate damages caused to human health and natural environments. Instead of burdening consumers (who already shoulder the hidden cost of food through health care, pollution cleanups, and other public services) with increased prices or taxing of unhealthy foods, solutions should prioritize consumer protection by taking into account the intrinsic disparities of the consumer-supplier relationship, including disparities in bargaining power, knowledge, and resources.
Greater transparency of the environmental and social risks incurred by all actors in the food supply chain, not just agricultural producers alone, is needed so that consumers, policymakers, and investors alike can disfavor risky and unsustainable business practices. Government regulation must also look beyond current marketing and labeling laws (which simply put the onus of informed decision-making back on the consumer) to set and enforce strict standards for what food and beverage products can be legally produced and sold.
Food processing plays an important role in food and nutrition security, extending shelf-life and fortifying staple foods with essential vitamins and minerals. Far from complete abolition, increased attention and accountability for these powerful private sector players can ensure that food production contributes to—and does not continue to impede—human and planetary health.
Abrania Marrero is a PhD candidate in Population Health Sciences in the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a former Agents of Change in Environmental Justice fellow.
Banner photo credit: Viki Mohamad/Unsplash
