Hasta La Gadget!

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — A Philippine court convicted nine people for graft Thursday over a 1996 nightclub fire that killed 162 people, mostly students celebrating the end of the school year.

The Sandiganbayan anti-graft court convicted seven former city engineering officials of suburban Quezon City and two operators of the Ozone disco and handed out sentences of up to 10 years. About 400 people were packed in the disco when the fire broke out, but many were unable to escape because the emergency exit was blocked by a new building next door.

Ninety-three others were injured in the blaze, one of the biggest nightclub fires in the world in the last 20 years.

The court disqualified the former city officials from ever holding public office for approving the nightclub’s building permit despite non-compliance with the building code and giving preferential treatment to the disco’s operators.

Stephen Santos, president of a group of the fire survivors, welcomed the court decision but lamented that the verdict took 18 years, in an interview with local television network ANC. He said he was afraid some of those convicted may have already left the country.

Trials in the Philippines normally take many years to conclude, with courts burdened by a huge backlog of cases. Supreme Court Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno said last month reforms are being instituted and more judges are being hired.

Two of the nine had been convicted in 2001 by another court for separate crimes of reckless imprudence resulting in multiple homicides, sentencing them to four years in jail and fined 25 million pesos each ($555,000). They are Hermilo Ocampo, president of Westwood Entertainment, the company that operated the disco, and Ramon Ng, Westwood’s treasurer.

By 2050, the world’s population will reach 9 billion — and all will need nutritious diets. Yet despite the intrinsic relationship between the food we grow and the food we eat, the agriculture and nutrition sectors are only just now beginning to overcome decades of mutual isolation. The high rates of malnutrition among farming communities are a stark reminder that the link between agriculture and nutrition is not as it should be.

Today, we are starting to see the divide between agriculture and nutrition begin to close. But it’s fair to say that our food system is broken. All the time, money and effort spent on trying to make it work still doesn’t make the food system deliver everyone an optimal diet. Today, up to 805 million people are hungry and 2 billion are malnourished — and 70 percent of them live in rural areas, with many rapidly moving to already swollen cities.

At the same time, 1.4 billion are overweight and obese, fuelled by Western-style diets that are damaging the planet and our health. Climate change is increasing food insecurity — particularly for rural populations which are most vulnerable to erratic weather patterns and unpredictable planting and harvest cycles. And despite many not having enough to eat, globally we throw away a staggering 1.3 billion tons of food each year.

Dietary diversity is among the key components of a healthy diet. In an ideal world everyone would have access to diverse diets, with a mix of fruits, vegetables and whole grains that provide the nutrients we need to live productive, healthy lives. That ideal, however, is still some way off.

Across the entire agricultural value chain there are opportunities to make food more nutritious at each stage. From seed choices and growing techniques to processing food and bringing products to market, innovations and individuals are making the food system work better. We are building the evidence base to better understand where nutrition is being woven into the agricultural chain, and how we can scale up these innovations.

But questions remain. How can we deliver better, more nutritious seed? Is there a better way of measuring impact? What do we need to do to enact the right policies to sustainably support agriculture and nutrition and keep this dialogue moving? With world leaders coming together at the second International Conference on Nutrition in Rome next week, we have a historic opportunity to advance the policies the nutrition community knows can work and to make our food system more responsive to human needs.

The food system won’t self-correct. We need more ambition, more innovation and more leadership to create a food system that delivers affordable, healthy diets to everyone in the world. For the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, that amounts to a food system that generates demand for nutritious food across the value chain; increases agricultural yields as well as the nutritional quality of foods; and acts as an incubator for innovative ideas, while recognizing the importance of proven interventions that improve the nutritional value of food such as large-scale food fortification.

We need to support sustainable solutions, and open a dialogue on what an optimal diet looks like. We must encourage the development of a global food system that leapfrogs bad diets so that we solve malnutrition without inadvertently exporting an obesity crisis. In Africa, the huge investment in cellphone technology has put a mobile phone in every household, leapfrogging landlines. We need to ask whether it is possible to do the same for a nutritious food system.

It’s only by coming together to focus on the obstacles and opportunities that we will succeed in building a better food system. Conflict, humanitarian crises and climate change will take their toll on the most malnourished and exacerbate nutrition and food security challenges over the long term.

The Second International Conference on Nutrition (ICN2) is a critical opportunity to develop a sustainable food system that delivers healthy, nutritious, affordable food to those that need it most. If we are to become the generation that ends malnutrition nothing short of a new food system paradigm will do.

Read GAIN’s new snapshot report Cultivating Nutritious Food Systems

The article originally appeared on Devex

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