Ravuvu Amerita, Friel Sharon, Thow Anne Marie, Snowdon Wendy, Wate Jillian
School of Regulation and Global Governance, Australian National University, Australia.
Menzies Centre for Health Policy, University of Sydney, Australia.
Health Promot Int. 2018 Oct 1;33(5):887-900. doi: 10.1093/heapro/dax020.
Despite the growing rates of obesity and diet-related non-communicable diseases, globally, public health attention has only relatively recently turned to the links between trade agreements and the nutritional risks associated with it. Specific trade agreements appear to have played an influential role in the volume and types of foods entering different countries, yet there is currently no systematic and objective monitoring of trade agreements for their impacts on food environments. Recently, INFORMAS was set up to monitor and benchmark food environments, government policies and private sector actions within countries and globally. One of its projects/modules focuses on trade policy and in particular the food-related aspects of trade agreements. This paper describes the INFORMAS trade protocol, an approach to collecting food-related information about four domains of trade: trade in goods; trade in services and foreign direct investment; domestic supports, and policy space. Specifically, the protocol is tested in Fiji. The development and testing of this protocol in Fiji represents the first effort to set out a framework and process for objectively monitoring trade agreements and their impacts on national food supply and the wider food environment. It has shown that entry into WTO trade agreements contributed to the nutrition transition in Fiji through the increased availability of imported foods with varying nutritional quality. We observed an increase in imports of both healthy and less healthy foods. The application of the monitoring protocol also highlights challenges for data collection associated with each trade domain that should be considered for future data collection and analysis in other low and middle income countries.
尽管全球肥胖率和与饮食相关的非传染性疾病发病率不断上升，但直到最近，公共卫生领域才相对开始关注贸易协定与相关营养风险之间的联系。特定的贸易协定似乎对进入不同国家的食品数量和种类产生了重大影响，然而目前尚无对贸易协定对食品环境影响的系统客观监测。最近，“国际食品和农业政策研究协会（INFORMAS）”成立，旨在监测各国国内及全球范围内的食品环境、政府政策和私营部门行动，并设定基准。其项目/模块之一聚焦于贸易政策，特别是贸易协定中与食品相关的方面。本文介绍了INFORMAS贸易协议，这是一种收集有关四个贸易领域食品相关信息的方法：货物贸易；服务贸易和外国直接投资；国内支持以及政策空间。具体而言，该协议在斐济进行了测试。该协议在斐济的制定和测试是首次为客观监测贸易协定及其对国家食品供应和更广泛食品环境的影响而制定框架和流程的努力。结果表明，加入世界贸易组织（WTO）贸易协定通过增加营养质量各异的进口食品供应，推动了斐济的营养转型。我们观察到健康食品和不太健康食品的进口量均有所增加。监测协议的应用还凸显了与每个贸易领域相关的数据收集挑战，其他低收入和中等收入国家在未来的数据收集和分析中应予以考虑。
