The Norwegian food and nutritional policy.

Abstract

Few people concerned with public health can have avoided noticing the importance of nutrition to health. Two major issues are involved: 1) to create in the industrialized countries an environment conducive to the production and consumption of foodstuffs not merely for successful marketing but, more importantly, for the creation of a nutritional basis that will maintain and promote health; and 2) in light of a global perspective to develop national food policies that will allow for the most efficient satisfaction of nutritional needs in countries where food surpluses are created and a redistribution of nutritional surpluses to those countries where domestic production cannot satisfy domestic needs. On the one hand the issues involve improving the malnutrition and overconsumption of food in the industrialized countries, and on the other hand they involve a redistribution of nutrition from the industrialized countries to the developing countries where under-nutrition and the lack of a differentiated diet are the chief nutritional problems. The industrialized countries, with nearly 30 per cent of the world population, produce roughly 60 per cent of the most important foodstuffs in the world. There is nothing new about the need for nutritional and food policies on the national level. In the 1920s the Health Section of the League of Nations recommended that all countries develop national food policies, and this most likely led to the creation in some countries of certain guidelines for the production and consumption of food. The ability of countries to adapt to the extraordinary circumstances created by World War 11 undoubtedly was a result of the initiative taken by the League of Nations some 15 years earlier. At the first United Nations Conference at Hot Springs, Virginia in May 1943, there was a call for the development of not merely national but also international food policies. The result of this conference was the creation of the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, and its chief aim was to encourage the creation of national food policies as well as coordinate the distribution of foodstuffs from the producing nations to the consuming nations. In 1948 a World Food Board was