Economic development and its influences and risks for nutrition, cuisine and health

This paper reviews the evidence on some of the major trends in economic development at a global level and assess their influence on food, nutrition and health. Food and nutrition are themselves broad topics, and each is influenced by a myriad of local and international forces, making them both interesting and important, but also challenging in their complexity. It is especially difficult to deal with such a vast and complicated terrain in such a short paper, and one must inevitably deal only superficially with a number of complex areas. This paper will review a number of key forces for change in the global system, with a focus on the implications of each for food and nutrition. Each area is central to the experience of economic, social and political development, particularly in the period since 1945, and each is tied in various ways with that complex and interrelated set of changes that we call globalisation. Seven key factors will be explored: global population growth, leading to strong pressures on world availability of arable land and food; increasing integration in the global economy, as measured through such things as trade, financial flows and information exchanges, and with specific implications for the food industry and for trade in food products; growing gaps between rich and poor countries; similar increases in disparities between rich and poor segments within individual countries; the rapid growth of cities in the developing world, resulting in massive challenges for the food supply systems of many nations; the growth within some countries, for example in a number of Asian countries, of a "new middle class" with distinctive patterns of consumption; and, high levels of population movements between countries resulting in the creation of significant communities of immigrants in a number of nations. Examples will be drawn from the two regions familiar to the author, Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, but with a particular emphasis on East Asia.