Nutrition policy-making in Fiji: working in and around neoliberalisation in the Global South

© 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Many low- and middle-income countries experience a double burden of malnutrition and nutrition-related noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). Existing scholarship highlights adverse impacts of neoliberalism on nutrition, including the influence of laissez-faire economics on reshaping food systems and neoliberalism’s ideological emphasis on personal responsibility for healthy lifestyles. Yet how nutrition policy-makers in the Global South experience and respond to neoliberal pressures remains poorly understood. The aim of this paper is to examine how neoliberal logic is experienced, internalised and resisted by nutrition policy-makers in Fiji. Two Fijian policy analysis case studies were developed in which food marketing regulations were shelved or abandoned: restrictions on marketing of unhealthy foods to children; and restrictions on marketing of breastmilk substitutes. Eleven semi-structured interviews with nutrition policy-makers and stakeholders were conducted in Fiji that focused on these regulations. Data were analysed using Critical Discourse Analysis. Public health policy-makers experienced neoliberalisation as undermining the regulation of food marketing from two directions. From the top-down, politico-economic vested interests were perceived to obstruct effective policy interventions, and from the bottom-up, community decision-making was heavily price-driven and pro-consumer ‘choice’. Participants devised strategies to redress these influences, including rearticulating the NCD problem in economic terms in order to resonate in a neoliberal climate and to empower grassroots ownership of the issue. In the effort to implement nutrition policy, public health policy-makers worked within or around the neoliberal regime, rather than directly challenging it.