A serious argument has been under way in global public health about who is allowed to inform food policy. Some of the most influential voices in nutrition research now argue that anyone who has taken funding or expertise from food and drink companies should be removed from universities, refused publication in journals, and excluded from policy discussions altogether.
The stated aim is to protect science from commercial influence, but the likely effect is to narrow it.
Here is FIA's position and mine. Keeping the food industry in the room produces better food policy, not worse. I am not disputing that diets across our region are under strain or that governments should act. They should, and many already are to address obesity and malnutrition. My argument is narrower and it concerns method.
The people who grow, formulate, make, and move food understand how it behaves in a supply chain, on a shelf, and on a specific household budget. Removing that knowledge from a food debate does not make a regulation more rigorous but in fact makes it less informed. Disclosing funding and interests is right and transparent, however, banning a sector from the conversation is something else entirely.
A Lancet Series on “ultra-processed” foods and human health towards the end of 2025, mapped the links between diet and disease in detail. But one strand went further: it proposed that researchers connected to food and drink makers be cast out of journals, dropped by universities, and barred from multi-stakeholder forums.
FoodDrinkEurope, the EU’s food and drink industry association, replied in The Lancet itself, arguing that such proposals are "narrowing science, not protecting it". And they are right. A funding source is a reason for transparency and scrutiny, not automatic exclusion. Applying that principle to only one side of a debate does not remove bias; it risks narrowing the range of perspectives considered in scientific and policy discussions.
Asia has not adopted this exclusionary approach, and that is precisely the opportunity. Singapore shows what the alternative looks like in practice. When its Ministry of Health prepared to extend the Nutri-Grade front-of-pack scheme to 23 categories of salt, sauces, seasonings, instant noodles, and cooking oils from 2027, it ran a consultation that engaged hundreds of stakeholders, among them manufacturers, importers, distributors, and retailers.
The resulting rules are demanding but at least they were shaped with the people who must make them work. For FIA's members, this is not abstract. Across the region, governments are writing front-of-pack rules, nutrient profiling models, reformulation goals and processing definitions at pace, and they are doing it across very different food cultures, supply chains, and price points.
A rule drafted without manufacturers can look clean on paper and then fail in a wet market, a school canteen, or a distribution network that crosses a dozen jurisdictions. When it fails, the cost falls on the businesses expected to comply and on the consumers the rule was meant to protect.
What I hear from members across Asia is consistent: they are not asking to write the rules but to be consulted and be in the room when the rules are being written.
Keeping the food industry in the room is not a concession to commercial interest. It is how regulators end up with rules that work in a market rather than only on paper.
So, the ask is specific: as governments across Asia build the next wave of food policy, they should keep industry inside formal consultations rather than outside them, and they should apply conflict-of-interest disclosure to every party at the table, advocacy and academic interests included, not to industry alone.