Pacific Island Food Revolution The Mission To create a happy, healthy and prosperous Pacific Island region based on its unique culture, agriculture and traditional capacities
The Conduit Increase the uptake of local agriculture both domestic and tourism uptake through the energizing and enhancement of local cuisine
‘Where cuisine goes, agriculture follows” Robert Oliver, TED Talk, 2013
The content of this document is the Intellectual Property of Robert 1 Oliver Enterprises © Why Cuisine?
Cuisine is culture. If you raise local cuisine, you lift culture.
Spam is not food. Neither are mutton flaps, turkey necks or instant noodles. But these are the foods the Pacific islands have embraced – and the results have undermined the health of their people, their economies and their environment.
Good food underpins the welfare of a country. Wrong food leads to obesity, diabetes and other lifestyle diseases including malnutrition. In the Pacific, these diseases are placing a massive unfunded burden on public health services and creating foreign aid dependency- let alone the effects on peoples happiness and daily lives.
Food is about economic growth. It is about the production of high-quality products for export, and the incredible impact of food in tourism seen in places like Thailand. It empowers women, the providers of family nutrition and sellers of food in markets and small shops.
And importantly, food and cuisine are about tradition, culture, and national pride. It is where people come together to share their culture, experience new flavours and deepen people-to- people links.
This submission aims to articulate that raising the profile, perception and status of domestic Pacific Island cuisines improves local health, tourism economy and cultural sense of self.
The content of this document is the Intellectual Property of Robert 2 Oliver Enterprises ©
Tourism- the Economic Opportunity
“To us - food mediates relationships, facilitates health, celebrates life and its achievements, defines identity, identifies culture and links us closely to the earth that gave birth to us. Therefore to offer our cuisine to the tourists – who are visitors to our land makes hospitality to them more whole. In the modern world it of course includes the stimulation of our economy as more tourists money is channeled to local farmers and processors” Suliana Siwatibau, Organic Farmer, Geneticist,
In the Pacific, tourism is the shopfront for economic opportunity and cultural engagement. In tourism, cuisine is both a destination brand opportunity and the link to local agriculture through tourism menus. Cuisine is the glue that holds it all together.
Creating efficient and effective linkages between tourism and agriculture would among other things, stimulate rural development and entrepreneurship, revive traditional agriculture and cuisine, reduce high levels of leakage through import substitution of tourism food requirements, and re-enforce Pacific Islands’ differentiation in international tourism markets.
The content of this document is the Intellectual Property of Robert 3 Oliver Enterprises © “When local food is in tourism, it becomes tourism for everybody: from farmers to fishermen to artisan food makers to the jam and jelly makers to the restaurateurs. I often think of Thailand and its street food….and here I see an extremely successful cuisine. Each of these vendors is a micro- economy -- often family based. And because this food is Thai in origin, it reaches further into the farms and fisherman and food producers to create a dynamic of culinary prosperity” Robert Oliver TED 2103
Stronger linkages between tourism and agriculture will also reduce the significantly high leakage of tourism receipts. It is that estimated that approximately 56% of visitor expenditure in Fiji is lost to leakage due to spending on imported goods and services.(1)
Food is estimated to represent approximately 30 % of total tourist expenditure (2). After removing 25 % for international air travel from the World Bank value for Fiji’s tourism receipts (US$971 million in 2013)(3), roughly US$218 million was spent by international visitors on food in Fiji in 2013.
1 International Monetary Fund, Pacific Island Countries: In Search of a Trade Strategy, 2014 2 ITC, Linking Agriculture to Tourism Market 2010 p3 3 World Tourism Organization, Yearbook of Tourism Statistics 2014 The content of this document is the Intellectual Property of Robert 4 Oliver Enterprises © According to a study that same year, about 70 % of food for the tourism industry in the Pacific is imported. It could therefore be assumed that in 2013, Fiji imported roughly US$153 million in food for international visitors.
There is limited local cuisine on Pacific hotel menus. There has been little awareness of Pacific cuisine in the originating tourism markets, and the chefs in the Pacific have had inadequate access to cookbooks upon which to base their creativity. Cuisine development would create a firm foundation for the development of the continued evolution of linkages between local agriculture and tourism.
“Local cuisine requires local agriculture. So in tourism led economies, the menus are the business plan of the nation” Robert Oliver, TED Talk, 2013
The content of this document is the Intellectual Property of Robert 5 Oliver Enterprises © At Home- Health, Happiness, Identity
The South Pacific is in a crisis. Every day, 2 Fijians have a limb removed due to diabetes, American Samoa, Nauru and the Cook Islands are the worlds most obese nations- with Tonga and Samoa not far behind.
“Interestingly, although countries in North America and Europe appear prominent on the global map owing to their size, the countries with the biggest obesity problems are almost exclusively found in the Pacific Islands - with American Samoa (74.6 per cent of the population), Nauru (71.1 per cent) and Cook Islands (63.7 per cent) making up the top three” The Independent, UK 2014
The content of this document is the Intellectual Property of Robert 6 Oliver Enterprises ©
There have now been 2 generations who have been raised under the umbrella of fast, processed and convenience foods. Small Pacific nations are vulnerable to the massive marketing campaigns of fast foods: marketing that is often passed off as truth. NGO Health initiatives tend to have been packaged into reduced components- less sugar, less fat, less fried food.
“Traditional food patterns were nutritionally adequate and were a good source of vitamins and minerals. There is no name in the indigenous languages for malnutrition and the first reports of beri beri were found in indentured labourers from China who lived mainly on imported foods. “The fine physique of the modern Pacific islander is a result of generations of good nutrition”.
Diet, Food Supply and Obesity in the Pacific, WHO Pacific Regional Office 2003
In 1940 visiting American nutritionist Weston Price observed Samoans as having had “ near perfect physiques” and even I, growing up in 1970’s Fiji, remember very little neither obesity nor diet-related public conversation. This is new.
The content of this document is the Intellectual Property of Robert 7 Oliver Enterprises © "The stereotype of Pacific food and Pacific Islanders is of islanders eating corned beef, fatty mutton flaps and chicken and reaping the terrifying results of this post-colonial diet with diabetes and other serious health problems. Because it is exactly that - a diet formed after colonials arrived and decided that it would be a clever idea to foist unwanted leftover fatty meats onto island nations because they would be cheap and a great way to get rid of food that first nations people no longer wanted, we need to see this stereotype for exactly what it represents – food colonisation, along the same lines as all other forms of colonisation, for the betterment of the colonial group at the expense of those colonised. Islanders took to these replacement foods often because they had moved away from their traditional diets and settled for the easier fast food diets of modern civilisation. That was the price of moving from a healthy subsistence lifestyle into a colonial co-dependent lifestyle” Cathie Koa Dunsford, Global Dialogues 2010
“Food colonization”, along with the landslide emergence of convenience foods, has had a shocking impact on Pacific Island health.
Additionally, there is a notion in the minds of many Pacific people that “overseas is better”, testament to the power of marketing and the thoroughness of colonization.
The content of this document is the Intellectual Property of Robert 8 Oliver Enterprises © Neither these imported foods, nor the processed foods that have deluged the region, are Pacific Island cuisine. The original diet was based on complex carbohydrates, seafood, lots of green vegetables, all forms of coconut and tropical fruit; a stunning whole foods cuisine. With this approach, the “less salt, less sugar” is taken care of all, but from a point of aspiration rather than agenda.
Domestically, the “whole food” traditional cuisine knowledge is the opportunity to combat the daunting NCD diet related health epidemic that is bringing the region to its knees.
The answer is right there in the Pacific backyard: in it’s farms, villages, and markets and in the dishes that Pacific grandmothers cooked.
This team remains undaunted by the enormous marketing budgets of the fast food companies- quite simply, we have a better story to tell: the story of South Pacific cuisine.
The content of this document is the Intellectual Property of Robert 9 Oliver Enterprises © The Power of Cuisine
4HE 0OWER OF #UISINE ! VISION FOR 3AMOA
#LIMATE CHANGE !RTISANAL PRODUCERS #ULTURE HERITAGE AND PRIDE 6ALIDATION OF TRADITIONAL !GRICULTURE 3AMOAN MENUS AND FARMING RECIPES BASED (OPSITALITY ON LOCAL ORGANIC &OOD