Most people know the EAT-Lancet Commission as a group of food and climate scientists who think about how to make our diets healthy and produced within planetary boundaries. The landmark 2019 EAT-Lancet report invented the concept of a Planetary Health Diet that if we all followed would help us live longer, healthier, and save the planet. It had such wide public appeal that when it was launched, I had dozens of friends calling me, saying they had seen the news, and asking if they really had to stop eating red meat to save themselves and the planet. 

Last week, the EAT-Lancet Commission published an update to that landmark report. And if you only got past the headlines, the key messages and the executive summary, you could be fooled into thinking that they stayed squarely within their lane of healthy diets within planetary boundaries. But they went way further and touched on an issue that I believe is the single most important driver of and barrier to ending global hunger and poverty: power. 

It is hidden in the section about “social foundations”. The authors define social foundations as the conditions needed to create a just food system that would enable the realization of the human rights to food, decent work, and a healthy environment.  

They argue that it is power imbalances created by highly concentrated market structures, that allow just a few firms to dominate key steps along the food supply chain. Indeed, when markets are highly concentrated with only a few players, this powerful position allows the dominant company to behave in a way that keeps prices artificially high (because there is no competition, so they charge excessive margins on the goods they sell), excludes new players from entering the market, and stifles innovation.   

Nowhere is the problem of market power more harmful than in Africa. The extreme levels of concentration in many African food and agricultural markets reveal dysfunctions and distortions: from input to retail, markets are concentrated and present high barriers to entry, leading to frequent and harmful cartels. These cartels are widespread and cross-border, as exemplified in this report through the cases of fertilizers, seeds, and poultry. You can read more in our recent report. 

Importantly, the EAT-Lancet authors put forward two ideas to tackle excessive market power. First, the need for companies to make price information available, specifically profit and mark-up data, since this is one way to track market power. Second, they call for more robust competition policies and strengthened national and international competition frameworks. 

This is absolutely spot on. We have a longstanding partnership with the Centre for Competition Regulation and Economic Development (CCRED) at the University of Johannesburg to advance precisely these two ideas. The African Market Observatory (AMO) at CCRED tracks the prices of 9 commodities in 8 Eastern and Southern African countries on a monthly basis to identify when markets are not functioning competitively. Research from the AMO has helped identify anti-competitive conduct in the fertilizer, feed, poultry, and dairy sectors and enabled us to work with competition authorities in Kenya, Zambia and the COMESA regional authority to conduct market inquiries in Kenya on anti-competitive conduct in the feed sector, in Zambia on the poultry sector, and in COMESA on mergers in the fertilizer and poultry sector.  

We are only at the beginning of the journey, but we can already see incremental change. Following the Kenyan feed inquiry, the government reacted to allow more competition in the feed sector, leading to lower feed prices for small-scale poultry, dairy, and fish producers. Following our work on mergers with COMESA, conditions were placed on a recent poultry merger to mitigate the risk of a monopoly forming. 

Improving justice in the food system through more enforcement of competition law and policy is one of the most effective levers for lasting change.