Professor Corinna Hawkes

Overview

Professor Corinna Hawkes is Director, Centre for Food Policy at City, University of London. She has over 20 years’ experience of working with UN agencies, national and city governments, NGOs, think tanks and academia to support the design of more effective action throughout the food system to improve diets, from local-level initiatives to national policies and global strategies. Her work is concerned with all forms of diet-related health and, malnutrition. Corinna is also a Distinguished Fellow at the George Institute for Global Health, Chair of Board of Bite Back 2030 and an advisor the The Food Foundation. She sits on the Global Evaluation Advisory Committee of the Multi-Country Obesity Prevention Initiative at the University of North Carolina/Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Past roles include Co-Chair of the Independent Expert Group of the Global Nutrition Report (2015-18), an international report tracking progress in malnutrition in all its forms across the globe. Between 2012 and 2015 she was Head of Policy and Public Affairs at World Cancer Research Fund International, where she established the NOURISHING Policy Framework for healthy diets and obesity. Corinna has also worked for the World Health Organization (Geneva), the International Food Policy Research Institute (Washington DC) and in 2009-2010, held a fellowship at the School of Public Health at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. She has worked extensively with UN agencies, including the Food and Agricultural Organization, the World Health Organization and UNICEF.

Between 2018-2022 Corinna was Vice Chair of London's Child Obesity Taskforce. She also co-chaired the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on Agriculture and Food Security (2016-18) and in 2008 chaired the WHO Expert Group on Marketing Food and Non-alcoholic Beverages to Children which produced the WHO Set of Recommendations on Marketing Food to Children. She was also a Commissioner on the Lancet Commission on Obesity and the EAT-Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems.

Corinna has published widely on the role of food policy and. food systems in diets and nutrition. She has a PhD in Geography from Kings College London (1998) and a BSc in Geography from the University of Bristol (1993). She blogs at www.thebetterfoodjourney.com.

Food policy, food systems, nutrition, diet, health

The ultimate goal of my work is to advance change: to improve nutrition, public health and well-being through policies that improve the quality of diets worldwide. I am concerned with how to design, develop and deliver effective food policies to achieve that goal. With a global scope, I work with partners internationally, in the UK, and in London to identify effective and efficient solutions to unhealthy diets throughout the food system with an interdisciplinary approach.

I am currently part of five research projects.
• Co-investigator of the UK Department of Health funded Obesity Policy Research Unit (led by UCL)
• Leading the policy workstream of the Wellcome Trust-funded Sustainable and Healthy Food Systems project (led by LSHTM).
• Principle Investigator on another Wellcome Trust-funded project on integrated food policy, which we are leading at the Centre for Food Policy.
• Chair of Food Research Collaboration, based at the Centre for Food Policy, which has three research streams related to integrated food policy
• I co-chair the Global Nutrition Report, in which I co-lead the process of doing the research and writing that makes up the content of the report.
• Leading a piece of work on double duty actions to address malnutrition in all its forms for the Lancet.

These current projects build on three main areas of work developed over the past two decades:

1) Monitoring and analysing what governments around the world are doing to develop and deliver policies to improve diets.
The aim of this work is to learn lessons for more effective policy development and delivery and to and inspire action. I wrote early reports for the World Health Organization on what governments were doing on food marketing to children and nutrition labelling around the world. I established the NOURISHING Framework to track progress on how well governments are doing to implement policies designed to improve diets. I am interested in the policy processes that led to their development and implementation, what effects they have had, and how these policies can be designed to be more effective. In 2015 my paper “Smart Food Policies for Obesity” aimed to identify how these types of policies can be more effectively designed. My most recent work in this involved identifying what city-level governments are doing to advance diets through urban food policies with the publication of the report “What Makes Urban Food Policy Happen” (2017) in collaboration with the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems. This was first report to highlight the obesity program in Amsterdam.

2) Identifying how policies could more effectively align how food systems function with better diets.
The aim of this work has been to understand how food systems work in order to understand how they can be levered for change. Much of my earlier work looked at the globalization of the food system, including trade. It assessed how policies of globalisation were linked with the “nutrition transition” in countries around the world. I also worked extensively on the link between agriculture, nutrition and health, contributing the early work that formed the basis of what is now the CGIAR A4NH programme. I then turned to developing methodologies designed to identify solutions to poor diets in food systems, with publications such as “Identifying Innovative Interventions to Promote Healthy Eating Using Consumption-Oriented Food Supply Chain Analysis (2009) and” Value Chains for Nutrition” (2011) with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). In 2016 I co-authored “Food Systems and Diets: Facing the Challenges of the 21st century” published by the Global Panel on Food Systems for Nutrition and Health which established a new conceptual framework on the link between food systems and diets and a diagnostic tool for identifying solutions. I am now working to use these methodologies to identify areas of (in)coherence between food systems and the policies that effect them with policies designed to improve diets and nutrition. I have recently completed my role as an advisor on a project led by the Inter-American Heart Association Argentina (FICA) on policy coherence for fruit and vegetable consumption. My future work on identifying food systems solutions to poor diet in the future is being taken forward through leading the Policy Research Group of the Wellcome Trust-funded Sustainable and Healthy Food Systems (SHEFS) project, which is led by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in collaboration with the University of Kawla-Zulu Natal. The work aims to identify policies that can more effectively improve diets and environmental sustainability and will use innovative food systems methodologies to do so in active engagement with local partners, communities and the policy community. Building on past work, I also have a strong interest in how food retailing as a key part of the food system can play a more important role in advancing healthier diets.

3) Exploring how food policies could take a more integrated approach to addressing diet-related ill health.
The aim of this work is to assess how policies can deliver more efficiently and effectively by addressing multiple goals. For example, in 2015 I became co-chair of the Global Nutrition Report, a report that tracks progress to address malnutrition in all its forms. In the three reports I have co-led since then (2015, 2016, 2017), we have worked to bring together these different forms of malnutrition into the report, and identify how shared action could benefit both sides of this “double burden” around the world. In 2015 this led to us coining the term “double duty” actions that can help address both undernutrtion and obesity. In 2017 I started working on a piece of research on double duty actions as part of a Lancet Series on the Double Burden of Malnutrition. Our Centre-wide work on integrated food policy is also an important part of this agenda.

As Director of the Centre for Food Policy I also oversee further our interdisciplinary research that advances our mission of a more integrated and inclusive approach to food policy.

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