Today’s food systems are contributing to several intersecting health and ecological crises of global concern. Recognising this, many are now calling for transformative, and some even say radical, food systems change. The United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) seeks to ‘transform the way the world produces, consumes and thinks about food’. However, many scientists and civil society networks are questioning what this will mean in reality, and where the mother-child breastfeeding dyad, breastmilk, and human rights will fit within the food systems transformation agenda. 

 

This Dialogue will show how and why breastfeeding – as the desirable norm for feeding human infants and children – is where healthy and sustainable food systems really begin and the challenges that must be addressed for this to be the universal social norm.

 

Amongst a host of current challenges; acknowledging the fact that women’s role in achieving optimal breastfeeding is essential yet billions of women are unable and unavailable to breastfeed due to the lack of social protection like maternity entitlements and childcare services in workplaces, these will be a cross-cutting focus on the social support needed by women. 

 

The first challenge is to acknowledge the importance of acknowledging breastfeeding as a first food system, and the urgent need to invest societal resources in enabling women to practice it. A second key challenge is to address the pervasive influence of corporations in undermining breastfeeding at multiple levels in families, in communities, in health systems and in societies. A further key challenge is to address the gender inequities and discrimination against women workers that arise from lack of adequate maternity protection and social services to underpin women’s invisible and unrequited care work, including breastfeeding.

 

International experts in human rights and breastfeeding, corporate political activity, food systems and food marketing and the political economy of breastfeeding will provide informed commentary on the need to protect and support women and their children and their right to breastfeeding and to ensure that the work of breastfeeding is acknowledged and resourced as the foundational food system.

 

Julie Smith, Chair of Dialogue, Honorary Associate Professor, Research School of Population Health, ANU, and Fellow, Tax and Transfer Policy Institute, ANU Crawford School of Public Policy

Penny Van Esterik, Professor Emerita, York University, Toronto and Adjunct Professor, University of Guelph

Phillip Baker, Co-chair of the event and Research Fellow, Institute for Physical Activity and Nutrition (IPAN), Deakin University

Arun Gupta, Central Coordinator, Breastfeeding Promotion Network of India (BPNI)

Vandana Prasad, Technical Advisor – Public Health Resource Society (PHRS), New Delhi

 

Alessandro Iellamo: alessandro.iellamo@gmail.com

Dr Julie Smith: Julie.Smith@anu.edu.au