Suchergebnisse

Unhealthy diets are increasing contributors to poor health and mortality in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Government interventions targeting the structural drivers of unhealthy diets are needed to prevent these illnesses, including nutrition labelling regulations that create healthier food environments. Yet, implementation remains slow and uneven. One explanation for slow implementation highlights the role of politics, including powerful ideological discourse and its strategic deployment by economically powerful actors. In this article, we advance research on the politics of nutrition policies by analysing political discourse on nutrition labelling regulations within an influential and under-studied global institution: the World Trade Organization (WTO). We identified WTO Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) Committee meeting minutes with reference to nutrition labelling policies proposed by Thailand, Chile, Indonesia, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Uruguay (2007–2019; n = 47). We analysed the frames, narratives, and normative claims that feature in inter-country discourse within TBT meetings and examined how actors mobilize ideological and material sources of power via these statements. We find that informal government challenges to nutrition labelling proposals within the Committee featured a narrative that individualized the causes of and solutions to poor diet, downplayed harms from industrialised food products, and framed state regulation as harmful and unjust. These non-technical claims mobilised neoliberal ideology and rhetoric to contest the normative legitimacy of members' proposals and to de-socialize and de-politicize poor diets. Furthermore, high-income countries (HICs) re-framed policy goals to focus on individual determinants of poor nutrition whilst calling for their preferred policies to be adopted. Patterns of discourse within TBT meetings also had striking similarities with arguments raised by multi-national food corporations elsewhere. Our findings suggest that non-technical and ideological arguments raised during TBT meetings serve as inconspicuous tools through which nutrition labelling policies in LMICs are undermined by HICs, industry, and the powerful ideology of neoliberalism.

In Fiji and other Pacific Island countries, obesity has rapidly increased in the past decade. Therefore, several obesity prevention policies have been developed. Studies show that their development has been hampered by factors within Fiji's policy landscape such as pressure from industry. Since policymakers in the Fijian national government are primarily responsible for the development of obesity policies, it is important to understand their perspectives; we therefore interviewed 15 policymakers from nine Fijian ministries. By applying the "attractor landscape" metaphor from dynamic systems theory, we captured perceived barriers and facilitators in the policy landscape. A poor economic situation, low food self-sufficiency, power inequalities, inappropriate framing of obesity, limited policy evidence, and limited resource sharing hamper obesity policy developments in Fiji. Facilitators include policy entrepreneurs and policy brokers who were active when a window of opportunity opened and who strengthened intersectoral collaboration. Fiji's policy landscape can become more conducive to obesity policies if power inequalities are reduced. In Fiji and other Pacific Island countries, this may be achievable through increased food self-sufficiency, strengthened intersectoral collaboration, and the establishment of an explicit functional focal unit within government to monitor and forecast the health impact of policy changes in non-health sectors.