This essay is part of What to Eat on a Burning Planet, a series exploring bold ideas to secure our food supply.
It’s hard to find drinking water in La Guajira, an arid peninsula in northern Colombia, where drought and overuse are sucking wells and small reservoirs dry.
When there’s no water, people turn to soda.
Over the last two decades, as climate change has grown worse, sales have skyrocketed in Colombia, with junk food companies heavily marketing their products to children. In 2017, the country’s largest soft drink manufacturer gave free sugary fruit drinks to thousands of young people in La Guajira under the guise of ending malnutrition. As of 2020, children there still had a malnutrition mortality rate that was six times the national average.
As a global nutrition researcher, I frequently hear about food companies boosting their marketing campaigns for sugary drinks and ultraprocessed foods, like prepackaged cookies and crackers, as climate change disrupts food and water supplies. What’s clear is that the companies are taking advantage of worsening environmental conditions to increase their profits. To stave off a major public health crisis, governments will have to double their efforts to make sure everyone has access to healthy food and clean water.
It’s easy to understand why poor communities can come to rely on ultraprocessed foods. In the Sundarbans, a large mangrove forest in India and Bangladesh, geographers have documented how rising sea levels, changes in rainfall and more intense cyclones have devastated fishing and traditional agriculture. Parents who are forced to leave to find work then send their children pocket money to buy food, which they often use to buy packaged snacks and drinks, one of the few sources of comfort or pleasure they can afford.
Thanks to climate change, fresh foods are often hard to find, and even when you can find them, without water, it’s difficult to cook them, making packaged and fast foods more enticing. Higher temperatures also make fresh food spoil faster.
Powdered drink mixes, canned soups or granola bars may seem like the ideal solution: They contain preservatives to prevent spoilage, and unlike locally produced food, they’re made by large, multinational companies that can source ingredients from around the world. In Southeast Asia, people have told me they think packaged foods are healthy precisely because they are less likely to go bad. This can create a strong affinity that is tough to break.
The food industry has rushed to capitalize on the opportunities afforded by climate change. During heat waves, companies often unleash a relentless barrage of advertisements on television, billboards and online, many of them for sugary drinks and junk food. In the Netherlands, McDonalds created a heat-sensitive billboard that dispensed free McFlurry vouchers when the heat broke 101.48 degrees Fahrenheit, or 38.6 Celsius. In India, during the extreme heat wave earlier this year, ice cream companies created new flavors and started selling them online to boost sales. In Bangladesh, ads showed people surrounded by orange blazes, sweating. “No matter how hot it is,” one tagline read, “just stay cool with Sprite!” In other countries such as Australia and Mexico, research has found a link between heat and soft drink and alcohol intake.
When a natural disaster strikes, many of these food companies are on hand to deliver emergency food aid. After recent floods in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, some residents reported receiving large quantities of cookies and chips from the government. In South Africa, Coca-Cola and Tiger Brands, the country’s largest food maker, deliver free packaged products to tens of thousands of people in need of food assistance.
Food companies often claim to be fighting the effects of climate change. For years, Coca-Cola has run campaigns promoting its efforts on water protection. But this is mostly marketing: Since at least the early 2000s, from India to Mexico to South Africa, Coca-Cola has been accused of extracting water from drought-prone areas. The company claims it returns 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 just a liter of a standard carbonated, sugary beverage.
Governments have started to push back. Earlier this year in Western Australia, after public outcry over Coke’s water use during a drought, the local water minister announced that the company would temporarily suspend groundwater extraction.
Actions like these are important, but also show that simply asking companies to change is not enough. Governments should do more to ensure that ultraprocessed food isn’t the only option in a warming world. First, countries could guarantee a right to clean water and healthy food, which creates a legal foundation for future regulations. Policies like taxes, warning labels and marketing restrictions would also help reduce consumption of ultraprocessed foods and prevent companies from pushing these products on children.
To ensure access to healthy foods and water, schools are a great starting place. Brazil’s school feeding program, which provides meals to 40 million children every year, requires 75 percent of foods to be fresh or minimally processed; at least 30 percent have to come from small family farms, one researcher told me. Investments in water, sanitation and hygiene have also given children access to drinking water in schools. In La Guajira, the Colombian government is working with nonprofit organizations to rebuild the water infrastructure to deliver clean water to the people who live there.
As extreme weather continues to batter food and water supplies, the food industry is likely to keep bombarding vulnerable communities with its messages and products. There’s no better time to rein the sales of these foods in — the hotter future will only make us further dependent on them.
Lindsey Smith Taillie is an associate professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a director of the Global Food Research Program. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
