Opinion: Heat waves and droughts are a bonanza for junk food companies [Video]

This essay is part of What to Eat on a Burning Planet, a series exploring bold ideas to secure our food supply.

It’s hard to find drinking water in La Guajira, an arid peninsula in northern Colombia, where drought and overuse are sucking wells and small reservoirs dry.

When there’s no water, people turn to soda.

Over the last two decades, as climate change has grown worse, sales have skyrocketed in Colombia, with junk food companies heavily marketing their products to children. In 2017, the country’s largest soft drink manufacturer gave free sugary fruit drinks to thousands of young people in La Guajira under the guise of ending malnutrition. As of 2020, children there still had a malnutrition mortality rate that was six times the national average.

As a global nutrition researcher, I frequently hear about food companies boosting their marketing campaigns for sugary drinks and ultraprocessed foods, like prepackaged cookies and crackers, as climate change disrupts food and water supplies. What’s clear is …