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Heather Tupou is tying up bean plants while she waits for her 15-year-old grandson, Stanley, to return from school. Behind her, a kite surfer emerges from the neighbouring beach resort and floats across an emerald lagoon. “When I was a kid,” says Tupou, a farmer on the Cook Islands, “we ate mostly fresh fish and tomatoes, pawpaw, and taro. But nowadays, kids would take chips before taro most days.” Stanley comes walking across the field. Lean and over six feet tall, he is fit and healthy, unlike many of his fellow students.
A recent ministry of health school survey here found that 24% of girls and 34% of boys are obese. “I know lots of people who prefer takeaways rather than cooking anything. I think that’s why there’s a lot of diabetes and all that,” Tupou adds. Food on the islands is making many of the islanders sick.
For the past 30 years, the remote Cook Islands in the South Pacific have been developing a successful tourist industry. Their pristine beaches and clear lagoons attract more than 120,000 visitors a year, providing work for islanders and accounting for as much as 90% of the economy. But their geographic isolation is both a blessing and a curse. The state’s 15 islands are now 82% food-import dependent, relying on weekly flights from New Zealand and cargo delivered by boat. The traditional diet, like Tupou’s, has been replaced by imported, often calorie-rich and nutrient-poor processed foods and sugary drinks. With the boutique resorts have come western-style fast-food outlets where islanders spend their wages and, as tourism has blossomed, so has obesity.
“We have a problem of food abundance here,” says the Cook Islands’ director of public health, Dr Rangi Fariu, as he stands outside an afternoon clinic in Rarotonga where a queue of overweight men and women wait to be seen. “Nowadays, people have money in their pockets and a lot of children are born with food in their mouths.” Fariu has been attending clinics on most of the islands for the past four years and his diagnosis is bleak: “It’s not a nice picture. Between 80 to 90% of men are obese. High cholesterol levels, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart problems. And of course, they are dying before their time, dying young.” In 2010, 81% of adult deaths on the Cook Islands were due to non-communicable diseases (NCDs).
This week, global leaders meet in Apia, Samoa, for the UN small island developing states (Sids) conference to examine the effects of globalisation on states such as the Cook Islands and consider the devastating social and financial implications of food abundance. Many Sids are at the forefront of the global NCDs epidemic, and tackling the ensuing health problems will ultimately require difficult decisions to be made regarding food imports, health and agricultural policy.
Recognising the severity of the problem in the Cook Islands, the government has increased duty on the sugar content in imported drinks. The ministry of health has initiated a community-based “invest in your health” campaign, which encourages islanders to exercise for at least 10 minutes, five days a week, and to consume five portions of fruit or vegetables a day. In support, the business, trade and industry board has launched a “Go Local” campaign, which encourages people to buy locally grown, cheaper produce. According to its CEO, Terry Rangi, the tourism sector is generally supportive. “The hotels want to buy local,” he says, “but we have to produce enough. It’s fine to have branding and push those concepts, but you’ve got to have the product.”
With such large numbers of tourists visiting the islands, the potential to develop the local market seems great, but providing a consistent supply of fresh fruit and vegetables to rival the weekly cargoes from abroad has proved to be a challenge. Farmers like Tupou are a rare sight these days. Land once used for agriculture is now being used for luxury resorts, and youngsters like Stanley, who would formerly have become farmers, are being lured by the tourism sector. “We’re heavily dependent on imports and the challenge is for us to be more self-sustaining,” Rangi says.
The ministry of agriculture is working with the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation to increase the availability of fruit, vegetables and root crops. Helping to change people’s behaviour and increasing the proportion of locally grown, nutritious and less calorific foods in the diets of islanders would certainly appear to be a step in the right direction. Whether the initiative goes far enough, however, is a matter of debate.
“A lot of the things happening today have made us continuously dependent on foreign inputs, whether it’s agriculture or other things,” says farmers’ leader Teava Iro, who argues that there needs to be much more investment, otherwise the few farmers who remain risk being locked into a cycle of dependence. “I think development is all about empowerment and there’s no middle ground. Either you fund it properly or you don’t bother at all.”
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