Clean water is hard to come by in La Guajira, an arid peninsula in northern Colombia, where drought and overuse are drying up wells and small reservoirs.
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When there is no water, people turn to soft drinks.
Over the past 20 years, as climate change has worsened, sales have skyrocketed in Colombia, with junk food companies heavily targeting their products at children. In 2017, the country’s largest soft drink maker gave away sugary fruit drinks to thousands of young people in La Guajira under the pretext of ending malnutrition. In 2020, children there still had a mortality rate from malnutrition six times higher than the national average.
As a global nutrition researcher, I frequently hear about food companies ramping up their marketing campaigns for sugary drinks and ultra-processed foods, like cookies, as climate change disrupts food and water supplies. What is clear is that Companies are taking advantage of the exacerbated environmental conditions to increase their profits.
To avoid a major public health crisis, governments will need to redouble their efforts to ensure that everyone has access to healthy food and clean water.
It’s easy to understand why poor communities might come to rely on ultra-processed foods. In the Sundarbans, a vast mangrove forest in India and Bangladesh, geographers have documented how rising sea levels, changes in rainfall and more intense cyclones have devastated traditional fisheries and agriculture. Parents forced to leave to find work send money to their children to buy food, which they often use to buy packaged snacks and drinks — one of the few sources of pleasure they can afford.
Thanks to climate change, fresh food is often hard to find, and even when it is available it is difficult to cook it without water, making fast and packaged meals more appealing. Higher temperatures also cause fresh food to spoil faster.
Powdered drink mixes, canned soups or granola bars may seem like the ideal solution: they contain preservatives to prevent spoilage and are made by large multinational companies that can source ingredients from all over the world. In Southeast Asia, people have told me that they believe packaged foods are healthy precisely because they are less likely to spoil.
The food industry has been quick to seize the opportunities offered by climate change. During heatwaves, companies typically unleash a relentless barrage of TV, billboard and online ads, many of them for sugary drinks and junk food. In the Netherlands, McDonald’s created a heat-sensitive billboard that handed out free McFlurry vouchers when the heat exceeded 38.6 degrees Celsius. During the extreme heatwave in India earlier this year, ice cream companies created new flavors and began selling them online to boost sales. In other countries such as Australia and Mexico, research has found a link between heat and soft drink and alcohol consumption.
Food companies often claim to be fighting the effects of climate change. For years, Coca-Cola has run campaigns promoting its water-protection efforts. But this is mostly marketing: Since at least the early 2000s, Coca-Cola has been accused of extracting water from drought-prone areas from India to Mexico to South Africa. The company claims to return 94 percent of the water it uses to nature, but the process is still incredibly water-intensive: One 2010 paper estimated that it takes hundreds of liters of water to produce a single liter of a standard sugary, carbonated drink.
Governments have begun to fight back. Earlier this year, after public outcry over Coca-Cola’s use of water during a drought in Western Australia, the local water minister announced that the company would temporarily suspend groundwater extraction.
Actions like these are important, but they also show that it is not enough to ask companies to change. Governments must do more to ensure that ultra-processed foods are not the only option in a warming world. First, countries could guarantee the right to clean water and healthy food, creating a legal basis for future regulation. Policies such as taxes, warning labels and marketing restrictions would also help reduce consumption of ultra-processed foods and prevent companies from targeting these products to children.
To ensure access to healthy food and water, schools are an excellent place to start. Brazil’s school feeding program, which provides meals to 40 million children each year, requires that 75 percent of food be fresh or minimally processed; at least 30 percent has to come from small family farms, one researcher told me. Investments in water, sanitation and hygiene have also given children access to safe water in schools.
As extreme weather continues to hit food and water supplies, the food industry is likely to continue bombarding vulnerable communities with its messaging and products. There is no better time to curb sales of these foods — a warmer future will only make us more dependent on them.
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