The Global Health Advocacy Incubator (GHAI) an initiative of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids (CTFK), in collaboration with the Pan-African Legal Network on Food and Nutrition hosted the 1st Litigation Symposium from 3rd to 5th December in Marrakech, Morocco. The symposium brought together public health lawyers from 16 countries across the world including the Philippines, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Jamaica and the United States of America to discuss advocacy and legal issues on food policies. The main objective of the symposium was to build and strengthen the capacity to develop, hone, and expand the use of strategic litigation as a tool to advance public health and injury prevention policy initiatives at local, regional and global levels.
The participants shared experiences tackling cases on new phenomena such as greenwashing and ‘nutri-washing’; the two most frequent categories leveraged by the ultra-processed products industry. Greenwashing practices include environmental pledges impossible to fulfil such as claiming 100% packaging recyclability, promoting water protection while they explode hydric resources simultaneously or lobbying against binding environmental measures among other false claims. Nutri-washing entails the generation of a halo around their unhealthy products and brands, presenting themselves as a legitimate voice on public health issues, among others. These actions have the potential to easily deceive consumers and other audiences, which could be taken before courts to make relevant actors accountable.
KELIN has representation in the Council of the Pan African Legal Network on Food and Nutrition (PALNEF) and is also implementing a program supported by GHAI on ‘Promoting Conducive Regulatory and Policy Frameworks for Healthy Diets through Advocacy and Collaborative Coordination in Kenya’. The goal of the project is to build on our successes, address the emerging challenges and to amplify our advocacy efforts for the development of evidence-based food policies to promote a conducive regulatory and policy framework for healthy diets through advocacy and collaborative coordination in Kenya.
An emerging mitigation strategy is addressing the increase of healthy diets from a consumer protection angle using consumer protection law. For progressive countries that have explored a consumer protection pathway such as Brazil, claims for limitation of actions, especially when marketing unhealthy foods and formulating unhealthy and environmentally degrading products have been pursued through consumer protection authorities linked to government. This is a particular avenue that KELIN may wish to pursue these strategies to complement our advocacy efforts for promotion of healthy diets through policy change.
A last observation that would give a boost to enforcement of regulations on healthy foods and the environment would be cost recovery for regulatory violations as pursued in the United States of America. If refined to suit local contexts, the ability to recover costs for non-conformity and adherence to regulations and decisions from courts would heavily shake the industry who have for a long time been complacent.
KELIN gained greatly from this exchange and has picked best practise to pursue in the Kenyan jurisdiction in an aim to promote healthy food policy environments.
For more information, please contact:
Martha Ogutu and Nyokabi Njogu
Health and Governance, Strategic Litigation Unit
P. O. Box 112 – 00202 KNH Nairobi,
Tel: 020, 2515790
E-mail: marthaogutu@kelinkenya.org, vnjogu@kelinkenya.org
Website: www.kelinkenya.org
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/kelinkenya
