Opinion | Heat Waves and Droughts Are a Bonanza for Junk Food Companies

This essay is part of What to Eat on a Burning Planet, a series exploring bold ideas to secure our food supply. Read more about this project in a note from Eliza Barclay, Opinion’s climate editor.

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.