Big Food Is Weaponizing Law Against Public Health -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka

You are familiar with how this litigation stops looking like the normal commercial defense when corporations sue governments for warning citizens off unhealthy food over and over again. It starts to look like regulatory obfuscation through the courts.

An investigation by The Guardian, Lighthouse Reports and other academics and media organizations found 235 lawsuits against ultra-processed food policies in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, the United States and Britain between 2010 to 2025. Three-quarters were started by manufacturers or their trade associations. Although the industry purportedly (at least in resolved cases) managed to save nearly 75 percent of what was sought, litigation still took an aggregate 600 years worth of time.

The attempted measures were almost modest: front-of-package warnings, levies on junk food and marketing curbs for kids. But these actions endanger an outrageously lucrative business model based on cheap commodities, high processing, vast marketing and routine consumption. This means that litigation commercially can succeed even where it fails legally.

If a corporation can defer a warning label, drain a health ministry’s budget, intimidate smaller countries and put off neighboring governments from enacting similar rules, it doesn’t have to win. The legal machinery serves as an instrument of attrition: string out the regulation, keep sales flowing, and make taxpayers pick up the public health costs.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General called this pattern as a form of industry interference that generate doubt and blocks regulation. Obesity affects almost one billion people around the world and diets low in fruits, vegetables and other foods are risk factors for cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and some cancers. They acknowledge the complexity of obesity (not being caused by any single food, behaviour or corporation) but have also called for private-sector responsibility on the health impact of their products.

Corporate defendants have a right to be free from arbitrary, discriminatory or scientifically unjustified regulation—particularly when it comes with the threat of criminality. That right is fundamental. But due process must not be turned into an excuse for a corporate veto on the health policy choice of democracy. When corporations publicly claim to support informed consumer choice while secretly attempting to undermine the very labels that allow for it, “collaboration” is just public-relations theater.

Governments need a coordinated counteroffensive.

The globally applicable framework should be based upon similar principles to those conflict of interest safeguards already developed for tobacco control.

To this end, two actions would involve states creating directories of corporate plaintiffs, beneficial owners, trade groups and legal expenditures and regulatory results that could be easily viewed by the public at large.

Third, they need to set up an international legal-defence fund so that low- and middle-income governments cannot be economically bullied into abandoning rules based on evidence.

Fourth, there needs to be compulsory front-of-package warnings (rather than industry accept-as-credible-wording), limits on child-directed digital advertising and market-based health taxes along objectively defined criteria of sugar, sodium and unhealthy fats not political definitions that are open to personal interpretation.

Third, courts should expedite public-health litigation and require full transparency of the industry-funded research cited as evidence against regulation. Governments, in turn, need to publish their scientific evidence and assess polices dispassionately.

The interventions recommended by WHO include nutrition labeling; legally binding restrictions on marketing of unhealthy food and beverages to children; healthier school-food standards; and fiscal and economic policies that encourage people to eat healthier.

The question of whether corporations have standing to sue is not the critical one. It is whether wealth should buy enough delay to turn preventable disease into a money-making business. Justice is not protecting health, it is selling the harm, if every warning label has to pass years of corporate warfare.

Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Faculty of Law University 17 August 1945 Surabaya and Managing Partner Law Firm Victorious Indonesia