Abstract
Many Small Island Developing States (SIDS) lead global rates in obesity and non-communicable chronic diseases (NCDs). Drivers for this are complex and include lack of food sovereignty, evidenced by an increasing reliance on cheap nutrient-poor food imports and a focus on export orientated cash crop production for much local agriculture. To better inform SIDS’ policy goals of improving nutrition through increased local food production, we explored in two SIDS current practices of food production and consumption. Teams of researchers from the two main regional universities conducted 28 focus groups in Fiji in the Pacific and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in the Caribbean with rural and urban communities of different socio-economic or land-owning status. In both countries home gardens were still common, valued as providing staple foods to households and contributing to health and livelihoods. Yet social changes had been experienced over the life course and across generations, such as increased purchase of foods, consumption of processed and often imported foods, and fast foods. While participants associated local foods with better nutrition and health outcomes than imported foods, some local foods were also acknowledged as unhealthy (e.g. locally produced tinned products, pesticide contaminated fresh produce). Finally, as food and related health advice moves globally, crossing national boundaries, and through formal and informal channels, local experiences can be confusing and contested. We suggest the need to understand temporal and spatial aspects of social practices, as social practices and their meaning change over time, travel globally and are experienced locally. To enhance and support re-localising food to counteract unhealthy consumption of ultra-processed, shop-bought, often imported foods, it is vital to understand these lived experiences of changes and resulting uncertainties, and to explicitly build on the longstanding positive relationships that people continue to express about home gardens and local food.
Highlights
Small Island Developing States (SIDS) have identified the urgent need to address high rates of malnutrition and its sequelae, including obesity and non-communicable chronic diseases (NCDs) (Tolley et al, 2016; WHO, 2014)
Social practice approaches have established themselves as increasingly favoured social theoretical alternatives to psychological models of “health behaviour”, and a social practice lens is foregrounded in our work in which we aimed to understand the interlinkages and dynamics of local food production, preparation and consumption
Common concerns largely outweighed any differences between Fiji and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) and are emphasised here; our analysis did not find clear differences between male and female, young and old or rural and urban participants unless explicitly stated below
Summary
Located in the Caribbean and the Pacific, SIDS’ population rates of overweight, obesity and NCDs exceed both those of many other low and middle income countries as well as high income countries (WHO, 2018; Sobers and Samuels, 2019). SIDS are affected by macro-level drivers of their NCD burden, including complex vulnerabilities in their food systems (FAO et al, 2017). One manifestation of this is a lack of food sovereignty, which can be defined as the right to “healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and [...] to define their own food and agriculture systems” (Wilson, 2012). The Food and Agricultural Organization highlighted the “alarming trend” of “food import dependency in SIDS”; over 60% of food consumed is imported in the Pacific and Caribbean (and in some countries much more), and much of this imported food is ultra-processed, energy-dense and nutrient-poor (FAO, 2016)
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