Justin Macmullan, Consumers International’s
Head of Advocacy discusses the recent report by the Commission for Ending
Childhood Obesity, endorsed by the World Health Assembly last week, and
outlines what it means for consumers.
Helping consumers to choose healthy diets
is a major challenge when, in many countries, the marketing of food, the food
choices available and the prices of different foods all appear designed to
promote an unhealthy diet high in calories, fat, sugar and salt.
With 70 million young children predicted to be overweight or obese by 2025 this is a major public
health issue and one that Consumers International (CI) and our Members have campaigned on for many years,
most recently for World Consumer Rights Day 2015.
At this year’s World Health Assembly,
governments and civil society had the opportunity to consider the World Health
Organisation’s (WHO) latest initiative in this area, the Ending Childhood Obesity (ECHO) report which was a personal initiative of Dr
Margaret Chan the Director General of the WHO.
The report, which was developed by an
appointed commission,
delivered more than 30 recommendations across six areas including promoting
intake of healthy foods; promoting physical activity; preconception and
pregnancy care; early childhood diet and physical activity; health, nutrition
and physical activity for school children; and weight management..
What’s in the report?
First of all, as the list of topics shows,
this is a report about tackling obesity rather than diet-related disease.
Therefore, for example, it includes recommendations on increasing physical
activity as this helps to reduce obesity, but not on salt reduction as this is
not directly related to obesity.
Looking specifically at the
recommendations related to healthy diets, the report includes many of the
issues CI and our Members have campaigned on including restricting marketing of unhealthy food to children, improved nutritional information including front of pack labelling, improving the
availability of healthy food in public institutions, improving nutrition
information in schools, introducing
taxes of sugar sweetened beverages, promoting breast feeding. There are
gaps – notably in relation to the impact of trade and investment agreements on
the ability of governments to take action – but there is also much to welcome.
Another possible criticism is that it offers
little that is new but, although this might be true, it does have the benefit
of bringing these proposals and recommendations together in one place to create
a comprehensive package, stating the proposals clearly and adding the logo of the
WHO on the cover, which gives the whole exercise political status and weight.
Will it make a difference?
The challenge is what will happen
next. Following a resolution
agreed at this year’s World Health Assembly, the WHO is now charged with
developing an implementation plan to support the report’s recommendations. If
this is going to be effective it must deal with some of the issues that have
frustrated previous initiatives in this area.
CI’s Recommendations for a Global Convention to Protect and Promote Healthy Diets seeks to
address these challenges by moving the discussion on from ad hoc initiatives to
an international legal framework that would support action on a comprehensive
set of policies at the national level. The ECHO report doesn’t include that
recommendation, but their implementation plan does have the potential to go
some way towards it.
To do that, the key area of accountability
must be addressed. The Director General of the WHO, Dr Margaret Chan, on whose
initiative this report was developed, has often used the phrase, ‘what gets counted gets done’ in relation to increasing accountability and
delivering results. We hope the same maxim will apply to this important area of
work.
A proposal to create a monitoring system
as part of the implementation plan could signal genuine progress, but only if
it is sufficiently strong, transparent and well publicised and monitors the
quality and implementation of policies as well as results. Only this way can
governments be held to account for their actions and a clear picture emerge of
successes and challenges in implementation.
Read the statement on the ECHO
that CI and 9 other NGOs gave at the WHA last week.
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