Month: March 2024

The issue comes under the broad heading of ethical investment, in which environmental, social and governance concerns are a factor in making investment decisions.

Dr. Trevor Hancock

18 March 2024

701 words

So far, in examining what the World Health Organization calls the commercial determinants of health, I have been looking at private sector firms that produce products that harm health, such as tobacco, fossil fuels or unhealthy foods. But the private sector does not just produce goods, it also provides financial services – such as banking and pensions – that support various industries by investing in them or providing loans.

Where these services are provided to companies that are producing products that are good for our health, such as healthy food or healthy housing, they contribute to health. But when they provide financial support to industries that produce harmful products they are harming health.

This issue comes under the broad heading of ethical investment, in which environmental, social and governance (ESG) concerns are a factor in making investment decisions. Ethical investors, for example, may choose not to invest in tobacco, fossil fuels or armaments for moral reasons.

In a recent article in Forbes Advisor, finance advisor Kat Tretina comments: “Investing solely to benefit from the highest possible returns is becoming somewhat passé.” She cites a 2022 Stanford University report that found “Older investors are overwhelmingly opposed to the idea of forfeiting investment return to advance ESG objectives.”

On the other hand, the study found “most young investors claim to be willing to give up moderate (between 5 and 15 percent) or large amounts (over 15 percent) to bring about environmental, social, and governance changes.”

But while ethical investment can be a personal decision about where to invest, most of us have large parts of our investments through our pensions (the CPP and various other pension funds) over which we have little or no direct control. So it is important that banks and pension funds invest ethically on our behalf, and that we urge them to do so.

In the case of tobacco, as a result of persistent advocacy by anti-smoking groups around the world, a number of major pension funds have divested from tobacco. A 2020 report from Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada noted several public pension funds have divested from tobacco, including California in 2000, Aotearoa New Zealand (2007) and Norway (2010).

But the report also notes: “Within Canada, with the notable exception of Alberta, governments have not consistently accepted responsibility for ensuring that the money under their stewardship is not invested in tobacco.” Indeed, in responding to one of my columns, Pender Island resident Paul Hutcheson noted in a January 22^nd comment in this newspaper that the British Columbia Investment Management Corporation (BCI), which is an arm of the BC government, “has $124.25 million invested in the tobacco industry.”

When it comes to fossil fuels, the Canadian banking and pension sectors have been the focus of recent critical reports. A March 24 report from FinanceMap, part of a global non-profit think tank called Influence Map, found that the ‘Big Five’ Canadian banks (Royal Bank of Canada, Toronto-Dominion Bank, Scotiabank, Bank of Montreal, and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce) “are undermining their own net zero commitments through their financing activities, lack of robust sector financing policies, and inconsistent policy engagement.”

Specifically, the report found, “the Big Five steadily increased their fossil fuel financing exposure from an average of 15.5 percent in 2020 to 18.4 percent in 2022” compared to “6.1 percent for leading US banks and 8.7 percent for European banks.”

Moreover, none “have committed to a phase-out of financing thermal coal” or “publicly advocated for ambitious climate-related policy in Canada.” This in spite of the fact that they are all signatories to the Net Zero Banking Alliance.

The pension funds don’t fare any better. The 2023 Canadian Pension Climate Report Card from Shift Action for Pension Wealth and Planet Health noted that not a single pension fund had acknowledged “the urgent need to phase out fossil fuels”. Indeed, “Canada’s largest pension funds continue to invest their own members’ retirement savings in companies that are accelerating the climate crisis, while delaying efforts to confront this unprecedented threat.”

Isn’t it time the financial sector stopped investing in products that harm our health – and remember, there are many other industries out there that harm our health – and instead invested in our health and wellbeing?

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

The shift towards a healthy food system: Too little, too late

·      Published as “Voluntary agreements with food industry not good enough”

The challenges we face are now so massive and occurring so rapidly that such leisurely approaches will be too little, too late

Dr. Trevor Hancock

12 March 2024

700 words

My recent columns have looked at the many ways in which our food system harms both our health and the health of the planet. So worrying is the extent of that harm that in September 2021 the UN held a Food Systems Summit to discuss the transformations in food systems that are needed.

At the Summit, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said the focus had to be on “feeding growing populations in ways that contribute to people’s nutrition, health and well-being, restore and protect nature, are climate neutral, adapted to local circumstances, and provide decent jobs and inclusive economies.” The Summit called for every country to appoint a national food systems convenor to establish a pathway to a transformed food system.

Then in 2023 the World Health Organization (WHO) convened a meeting to discuss food systems for people’s nutrition and health. The resulting dialogue “emphasized the importance of aligning food systems with nutrition and health goals” and using a systems approach to “integrate nutritious food systems actions throughout government policies while protecting the environment.”

Here in Canada, the federal government launched its Food Policy for Canada in 2019, with the goal of creating a healthier and more sustainable food system in which “all people in Canada are able to access a sufficient amount of safe, nutritious, and culturally diverse food.”

Canada also created the position of a national food systems convenor, who is a senior official in Agriculture and Agri-food Canada. Then in 2021 ‘Canada’s National Pathways’ report was published. The report looked at how to get to a healthier and more sustainable food system in the context of evidence that “one in 10 Canadian households experience moderate or severe food insecurity due to economic constraints; almost two in three Canadian adults are overweight or obese; and, over a third of Canada’s food supply is never eaten.”

Seven priority areas were identified in the document: Eliminating hunger and reducing food insecurity; reducing food loss and waste; strengthening Indigenous food systems; advancing environmentally sustainable production; supporting local food economies and a strong workforce; improving human and animal health, and working towards a National School Food Policy and Nutritious Meal Program.

But the Pathways report is quite weak on the health side. Glaringly, there is no reference anywhere to diet-related diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and some forms of cancer. The section on human and animal health focuses first on animal health, and the part on human health refers only to reducing sodium, fat and sugar through Canada’s 2016 ‘Healthy Eating Strategy’ and the Canada Food Guide, both of which are voluntary and intended “to make it easier for Canadians to make the healthier choice.”

But what is missing, it seems to me, is a sense of urgency. Governments and industry are still employing 20^th century approaches – risk management, tweaks here and there, voluntary agreements with the food industry – to 21^st century problems. Voluntary agreements to reduce sodium, for example, have clearly failed, while commitments to merely “monitor the extent and nature of advertising to children”, for example, are grossly inadequate. The government’s failure to pass legislation to control this illustrates both the government’s pusillanimity and the industry’s power, as well as its disregard for the wellbeing of children.

But the challenges we face are now so massive and occurring so rapidly that such leisurely approaches will be too little, too late. Nowhere in the Pathways report, for example, is there any suggestion of the need to move to a low-meat diet, other than a passing reference to “changes in consumer demand”. But a shift to a low-meat diet needs to be a central component of Canada’s  health food and healthy eating strategies if we are to get the very large health and environmental benfits of such a shift.

Admittedly, that shift is embedded in the new Canada Food Guide, but that is just a guide. Why not make it an urgent government priority to shift Canada’s agri-food industry towards producing a diet that is consistent with Canada food guide, and to make the unhealthy choice the difficult choice by, for example, banning or restricting advertising of unhealthy foods, raising taxes on such foods, and/or reducing taxes on health foods?

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

(Published as “Corporate lobbying needs to be kept out of the food system”)

The process of revising the Canada Food Guide shows that prohibiting or severely restricting private-sector lobbying has benefits for the health of people and the planet

Dr. Trevor Hancock

5 March 2024

700 words

In my last three columns I looked at the health and economic burden of unhealthy diets, the role of large parts of the food industry in producing and marketing an unhealthy diet, and the ways in which our current food system harms the planet. Clearly this has to stop, and you would think that governments would take a much stronger line than they do in requiring the food industry to put people and planet first.

However, governments seem reluctant to act. In part that is because the food industry is at best a challenging ‘partner’, often actively opposed to changes that would make our food system healthier for people and the planet. Moreover, the industry spends a lot of money lobbying governments to protect itself and promote its own interests.

Indeed, a study by researchers at the Université de Montréal and published in December 2023 in the Public Health Agency of Canada’s own journal noted extensive evidence that “the bio-food industry interferes with the development of public food policies worldwide through corporate political activity.”  Such activity “is defined as the attempts by corporate actors to shape public policy in ways that would protect or expand their markets or favour their industry’s interests.”

Note that this is the industry’s interests, which should not be confused with the public interest. Indeed, they add, the World Health Organization has expressed concern that such activity “may limit governments’ abilities to develop and maintain effective public health policies.”

For example, a 2022 article in the journal Globalization and Health looked at lobbying in relation to Health Canada’s Healthy Eating Strategy, from September 2016 to January 2021. At the time, Health Canada was proposing “revisions to Canada’s Food Guide, changes to the nutritional quality of the food supply, front-of-pack nutrition labelling and restrictions on food marketing to children.”

Using data from Canada’s Registry of Lobbyists, the researchers found the vast majority – around 90 percent – of registered lobbyyists and the corporations and organizations they represented had ties to industry, meaning the public interest barely got a word in edgeways, suggesting “a strategic advantage of industry stakeholders in influencing Canadian policymakers.”

The good news is that, just for once, and unusually, the Minister put in place restrictions on lobbying “during the revision of the Food Guide to minimize potential conflict of interest.” As a result,  staff at the Office of Nutrition Policy and Promotion “did not interact with stakeholders from the food and beverage industry during the development process.” So effective was this, in fact, that the Globe and Mail reported in 2017 that the industry tried an end run by asking Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada to lobby Health Canada for them.

Indeed, the Université de Montréal study noted, the Dairy Farmers of Canada even went so far as to ask the Prime Minister to “direct the Minister of Health to do her homework” when their industry-funded research findings were contradicted by independent research, while the Turkey Farmers of Canada wanted environmental impacts of food removed from consideration.  

The good news is that in the case of the revisions to Canada’s Food Guide, which was “the only initiative with extensive safeguards during the policy development process”, there were “significant changes and successful implementation.” The bad news is that “the policy which received the greatest amount of attention from industry (i.e., marketing to children) resulted in failed policy implementation”; it died in the Senate in 2019.

The lesson we should learn: Prohibit or severely restrict private sector lobbying – which, let’s face it, is just a form of buying influence. Doubtless we will heal squeals from the corporate world that their rights are being infringed, and they will invoke the wholly ridiculous notion – although apparently embedded in Canadian law, according to Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada – that the corporation “has the same rights and obligations as a natural person under Canadian law.”

But what these and other studies make clear is that it is the rights of Canadians to health and a healthy environment that are being trampled upon by many parts of the corporate and commercial world. It is way past time government stopped protecting corporations and stood up for the health of people and the planet.

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

• (Published as  “When it comes to food, what’s good for us is also good for the planet”)

A healthy diet can massively reduce our environmental impact — agriculture is responsible for 80 per cent of global deforestation and 70 per cent of freshwater use

Dr. Trevor Hancock

27 February 2024

699 words

What some call the agri-food sector – primary agriculture, food and beverage processors, food retailers and wholesalers, and foodservice providers – has a problem. We need to feed 8 billion people. But if the whole world ate the way we do, not only would their health be harmed and the toll of 11 million premature deaths would grow enormously, but the damage to the Earth’s natural systems would also grow enormously.

A 2022 UN report on global land use noted: “Modern agriculture has altered the face of the planet more than any other human activity”. The report found that “agriculture now occupies approximately 40 percent of the global land area”, and that 52 percent of that land is degraded. Moreover, agriculture is responsible for 80 percent of global deforestation and 70 percent of freshwater use, while drivers linked to food production cause 70 percent of land-based biodiversity loss and 50 percent of freshwater biodiversity loss.

Food production also accounts for about one quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, much of it methane from cows and other ruminant livestock and nitrous oxides from fertilizer use, the report notes. In addition, “deforestation and the draining and burning of peatlands for food and commodity production generate the bulk of carbon emissions”, while  centuries of ploughing and soil erosion have added large quantities of CO₂ to the atmosphere.

On top of that should be added the impact of food fisheries on the oceans and marine biodiversity. The World Wildlife Fund, citing the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, notes “the number of overfished stocks globally has tripled in half a century and today fully one-third of the world’s assessed fisheries are currently pushed beyond their biological limits.” In addition, there is substantial harm done to unwanted species – known as bycatch – as well as turtles, dolphins  and whales.

And added to all that is the pollution arising from the use of pesticides and fertilizers, animal manure and other causes, which result both in toxic impacts on humans and wildlife (pesticides cause harm to to the nervous sytem and reproduction in many species), while runoff “degrades water and soil quality, and causes eutrophication” – ‘dead zones’ in the oceans and algal blooms in lakes.

Clearly this state of affairs is unsustainable, especially when we consider that “nearly 80% of total agricultural land is dedicated to feed and livestock production while providing less than 20% of the world’s food calories”, according to the 2022 UN report. But meat consumption has been trending upwards, globally, for decades, suggesting that even more land will be needed, and it will need to be farmed more intensively.

The good news is that, as is usually the case, what is good for the planet is also good for us. It turns out that a more healthy diet is a more sustainable diet, as was described in a 2019 report from a Commission established by The Lancet – one of the world’s leading medical journals – and EAT – a global, non-profit foundation established to catalyze
a food system transformation.

The report – “Our Food in the Anthropocene” – explored how we would get healthy diets from sustainable food systems, noting that “without action . . . today’s children will inherit a planet that has been severely degraded and where much of the population will increasingly suffer from malnutrition and preventable disease.”

They called for “a radical transformation of the global food system”, proposing “a more than doubling in the consumption of healthy foods such as fruits, vegetables, legumes and nuts, and a greater than 50% reduction in global consumption of less healthy foods such as added sugars and red meat”, much like the new Canada Food Guide.

The report’s authors lay out a plan for such a transformation, adding: “Food is the single strongest lever
to optimize human health and environmental sustainability on Earth.” So a healthy diet can massively reduce our environmental impact. We urgently need the agri-food industry to be 100 percent behind this shift, for the sake of people and the planet. But their track record is not good and clearly the industry cannot be trusted to change quickly enough on its own, so this will require government action, as I discuss next week.

 © Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy