By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Jan 21 2025 – Corporate-dominated food systems are responsible for widespread but still spreading malnutrition and ill health. Poor diets worsen non-communicable diseases (NCDs), now costing over eight trillion dollars yearly!

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Unhealthy food systems
A recent UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) study of 156 countries found that such food systems account for unsafe food and diet-related NCDs.

FAO estimates related ‘hidden costs’ at about $12 trillion annually, with 70% ($8.1 trillion) due to NCDs such as heart disease, strokes and diabetes. Such costs significantly exceed these food systems’ environmental and social costs.

FAO’s annual State of Food and Agriculture 2024 (SOFA) investigated hidden costs worldwide. These were primarily health-related, followed by environmental degradation, mainly in more ‘industrialised’ agri-food systems in upper-middle and high-income countries.

SOFA 2024 builds on the 2023 SOFA. The two-year study uses true cost accounting to estimate significant costs and benefits of food production, distribution and consumption.

The study estimates “hidden costs and benefits”, including those not reflected by market prices. The latest SOFA updates cost estimates, classifies them by agrifood system, and proposes solutions.

The report identifies 13 dietary risks with health implications, with significant differences among various food systems. Inadequate consumption of whole grains (the leading dietary risk in most food systems), fruits, and vegetables is the worst, while excessive sodium and meat consumption cause significant health risks.

Hidden costs
SOFA 2024 identifies historical transitions from traditional to industrial agrifood systems, their outcomes, and hidden costs. It distinguishes six food systems worldwide – traditional, expanding, diversifying, formalising, industrial, and protracted crisis – and links each to hidden costs.

This approach enables a better understanding of each system’s unique features and the design of more appropriate policies and interventions.

However, inadequate fruit and vegetable intake is the main concern during protracted crises – e.g., prolonged conflicts, instability, and widespread food insecurity – and in traditional systems with low productivity, limited technology adoption, and shorter value chains.

Excessive sodium consumption is another significant health concern, rising as food “systems evolve from traditional to formalising, peaking in the latter and then decreasing in industrial systems”.

Meanwhile, processed and red meat intake rises with the shift from traditional to industrial systems. Meat is one of industrial food systems’ top three dietary risk factors. Adverse environmental impacts of unsustainable agronomic practices contribute significantly to hidden costs.

Such costs – due to greenhouse gas emissions, nitrogen runoffs, land-use changes, and water pollution – rise with diversifying food systems. Rapid growth typically involves changing food production and consumption, costing $720 billion more yearly.

Formalising and industrial food systems also incur significant environmental costs. However, countries facing protracted crises face the highest environmental costs, equivalent to a fifth of their output.

Social costs, including poverty and undernourishment, are most significant in traditional food systems and more vulnerable to protracted crises, incurring around 8% and 18% of GDP, respectively.

Such high social costs emphasise the urgent need for integrated efforts to improve livelihoods and well-being, reflecting stakeholder priorities and sensitivity to local circumstances.

Collective action
SOFA 2024 seeks to promote “more sustainable, resilient, inclusive, and efficient” food systems. It uses true cost accounting to identify hidden costs, going well beyond traditional economic measures such as the gross domestic product (GDP).

Using realistic and pragmatic approaches, policymakers make better-informed decisions to enhance food systems’ social contributions. More comprehensive approaches should acknowledge the crucial contributions of food systems to food security, nutrition, biodiversity, and culture.

Such transformations require transcending conceptual divides, ensuring health, agricultural, and environmental policy coherence, and fairly sharing costs and benefits among all stakeholders.

The report stresses that this requires collective action involving diverse stakeholders, which is difficult to achieve. Such stakeholders include consumers, primary producers, agribusinesses, governments, financial institutions, and international organisations.

Addressing hidden costs affects various stakeholders differently. Appropriate frameworks, supportive policies, and regulations ease implementation and minimise disruption by adopting sustainable practices early and protecting the vulnerable.

Recommendations
Recognising food systems’ adverse consequences for diets and health, the report makes several key recommendations quite different from those of the Davos World Economic Forum-compromised 2021 UN Food Systems Summit. It urges:
• incentivising the promotion of advancing sustainable food supply chain practices and balancing among food system stakeholders.
• promoting healthy diets by making nutritious food more affordable and accessible, reducing adverse health consequences and costs.
• using labelling, certification, standards, and due diligence to reduce greenhouse gas and nitrogen emissions, harmful land-use changes, and biodiversity loss.
• empowering society with comprehensive, clear, accessible, and actionable food and nutrition education and information about food choices’ health, environmental, and social impacts.
• using collective procurement’s significant purchasing power and influence to improve food supplies and the environment.
• ensuring inclusive rural transformations while reducing hidden health, environmental and social costs.
• strengthening civil society and governance to enable and accelerate sustainable and fair food system innovations and enhance social well-being, especially for vulnerable households.

IPS UN Bureau

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By External Source
Jan 21 2025 – Afghan women are enduring perhaps their most challenging time. Since the Taliban regained power four years ago, restrictions on women and girls have escalated, beginning with bans on education and paid employment.

Recently, the Taliban closed the few remaining employment opportunities for women, including positions in domestic and foreign NGOs. Women are now entirely barred from domestic or foreign NGO work. Unemployment among women is rising with the same frequency as new decrees are issued banning women form taking up various jobs.

Din Mohammad Hanif, the Taliban’s Minister of Economy, has warned non-governmental organizations against violating the decree banning women from being hired. Any breaches, he stated, would lead to the suspension of activities and revocation of licenses.

For the second time on December 28, 2024, the ministry sent out a letter, a copy of which was released to the media: “All non-governmental organizations are directed to strictly consider the decree banning women from working in NGOs and take the necessary actions accordingly”, cried the ministry.

Former female NGO employees describe the Taliban’s measures as “discriminatory, cruel, and inhumane.” United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volter Türk, also described the Taliban’s decree as deeply concerning and extremely discriminatory.

Stories of Loss and Devastation

The impact on women has been devastating. Razmaa Sekandari, 32, is one of the women who was forced out of her NGO job by the Taliban and ordered to stay at home.

“The head of our office, she says, forced all female employees to resign immediately, saying that if they don’t resign, the office will be closed indefinitely to everyone”. They had no option but to comply.

“I lost hope, says Ms. Razmaa, “I had no strength left and I couldn’t pick myself up on my feet”.

“And as the women and their colleagues were crying and hugging each other, the voice of the head of office thundered in a harsh tone”, ‘Hurry up, pack up your things and leave’

Continuing her narration Ms. Razmaa said, “In one of the foreign NGOs where I worked, we disbursed out small investment loans to women in Parwan province. It enabled some to raise chickens, and others reared cows. They had some income from the eggs, milk, and produced yogurt for themselves and their families”. But with the termination of their employment it has left Ms Razmaa wondering what to do next.

She shares a fate similar to hundreds of other women, some of who do not even have access to public information to learn of the new Taliban decree. As with all her colleagues, they have lost all hope and can hardly set foot outside the home.

“I had thought I could create jobs for women”, says, Ms Razmaa, who graduated in economics from Parwan University, “it didn’t happen”.

She became a stay-at-home woman after the Taliban decreed that she could no longer work.

“There are five of us in the family”, she says, “my mother is sick and my father is elderly, both of who stay at home with no income”.

About the other members of the family, Razmaa says her brother is a first-year law student. Her brother’s wife attended school up to the 11th grade when the Taliban banned females from having further education.

“In other words, we are all unemployed. I was the only one in the family who brought in income from my job, but the Taliban for no fault of ours, snatched it from us. We are at a loss as to what to do”, she sighed, out of frustration.

Working in NGOs was once a lifeline for Afghan women and girls. Now, it has been completely taken away, leaving them without hope or opportunity. Credit: Learning Together.

A Bleak Future for NGOs and Women

To Asad Wali, (not her real name) head of a foreign NGO in Parwan Province, the Taliban decree came as a surprise.

“We used to work in secret for the last two years”, Wali says. “Whenever our female employees went on field visits, they faced severe problems such as interrogation by the Taliban for not traveling with a mahram” (a male guardian).

In spite of such challenges, the women did pass through Taliban checkpoints using various pretexts, and were happy that, at least, they still maintained their jobs.

Asad Wali narrated the sad story, thus: “At the end of 2024, the project in which women were involved ended. We got a new donor. The proposal and all the documents were ready. The next day, we went to the Department of the Ministry of Economy in Parwan province, and they directly told us that due to the new Taliban decree, women’s activities had been completely banned.”

Terminating the activities of foreign and domestic non-governmental organizations in Afghanistan will only make the already harsh conditions worse for women.

These organizations play a key role in meeting the people’s basic needs and supporting the country’s infrastructure.

In the absence of these organizations, women would suffer severe consequences because NGOs were the main source of crucial social, economic and health services. Without them, poverty leading to forced marriages would rise among women.

All of the activities that the NGOs provided, such as skills, vocational training, and small holding agriculture, which improved the lives of women, are now being taken away. With unemployment and poverty rising, most of Afghan families are bracing themselves for a bleak winter.

Excerpt:

The author is an Afghanistan-based female journalist, trained with Finnish support before the Taliban take-over. Her identity is withheld for security reasons