The Influx of ‘Pisupo’: Food Colonialism in the South Pacific

Globalization has created an influx of unhealthy canned food in the South Pacific region, leading to a dependency on it and increasing health issues associated with an unhealthy diet. 

The influx of canned food in the South Pacific has led to a variety of problems. Salvation Army USA West. CC BY 2.0.

The legacy of colonialism has a lasting impact on the island of the South Pacific. Many of those islands have been colonized by Western powers, and some of them are still under the control of foreign countries. Due to this, Western influences are still pervasive throughout the region. 

One lasting legacy of Western imperialism in the South Pacific is the introduction of canned and processed food. The first canned food to be brought to the region was pea soup, and therefore, Samoan and a few other languages of the region, the word for canned food in general is “pisupo.” Today, the predominant type of canned food in the region is corned beef.

The prevalence of canned food in the South Pacific has changed the diets of the people living there and has caused a dependence on them. The new diets of the South Pacific Islanders are not necessarily an improvement from their traditional diets. However, as canned and processed foods are generally unhealthy and lacking in nutrients. That has resulted in an increase of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. Between 1990 and 2010, the total disability-adjusted life years lost to obesity also quadrupled in the region.

The traditional diets of South Pacific Islanders provide the nutrients needed for a healthy life. whl.travel. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

In order to provide these new foods, livestock such as cattle and pigs have been introduced to the islands, causing ecological damage. The island ecosystems are fragile, and large-scale ranching can easily destroy them. The dependence on canned food introduced by the West has resulted in not only harm to health, but also harm to the environment.

The proliferation of packaged and processed food has affected other parts of society as well, not just the typical diets. In marriage and birthday ceremonies in traditional South Pacific cultures, people often exchange gifts. While in the past, common gifts included fine mats and decorated barkcloths, but today, canned corned beef is one of the more popular gifts at those events. The introduction of canned foods has even changed traditional practices and contributed to the prevalent unhealthy diets of the South Pacific Islanders.

“Pisupo Lua Afe (Corned Beef 2000)” is a piece of art by Michael Tuffery that critiques the food dependency of the South Pacific. Sheep’R’Us. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

The neocolonial nature of these developments has its critics. One of them, Michael Tuffery, offers a unique interpretation through his artwork, with one of the most notable being “Pisupo Lua Afe,” a sculpture of a bull made from canned corned beef. He says that his art addresses the impact that the “exploitation of the Pacific’s natural resources has wrought on the traditional Pacific lifestyle.” His choice of subject matter and the material show his thoughts on the influx of canned food in the South Pacific. Bulls were a common presence at the aforementioned ceremonies, and the fact that the bull is covered in canned corned beef represents the fact that more traditional practices. Tuffery laments the changes that globalization has brought to his traditional Samoan culture, which has led to a “decline of indigenous cooking skills.”

With so much waste being created in the making of “Pisupo Lua Afe,” Tuffery calls into question whether the physical and cultural costs of food dependence are worth it. Could the South Pacific do better without the influx of canned food? Tuffery argues that it could. But even if the South Pacific Islanders decide to shun the prevalence of canned food, hurdles remain to improve the health of both the land and people of the region.

Bryan Fok

Bryan is currently a History and Global Affairs major at the University of Notre Dame. He aims to apply the notion of Integral Human Development as a framework for analyzing global issues. He enjoys hiking and visiting national parks.

Why Explosive Population Growth Is Unsustainable

The world is experiencing massive population growth, most of it in the Global South. If nothing is done to slow the rate, repercussions will be felt in politics, the economy and the environment.

A crowded street in Nairobi, Kenya, which has one of the highest population growth rates in the world. rogiro. CC BY-NC 2.0.

The world’s population is growing at an alarming rate. In 1950, the world’s population was estimated to be around 2.6 billion. In 2022, it is almost 7.9 billion. While it is true that the world theoretically has enough resources to support the entire current global population with room to spare, the rate of population increase is a cause for concern. Most of the world’s resources are concentrated in the countries of North America and Europe, but most of the world’s population growth is located in the Global South, which can negatively affect the development of those countries.

When agricultural societies start to industrialize, the death rate usually drops due to advances in medical care. The birth rate stays high for a while until social changes encourage more women to join the workforce and have fewer children. Many countries in sub-Saharan Africa are stuck in a demographic transition trap.

Current world population growth rate by country. Digital Dreams. CC BY 2.0.

As countries in the Global South start to industrialize, their death rates are falling, but their birth rates are not dropping to match the death rate, resulting in explosive population growth. This demographic trap occurs when “falling living standards reinforce the prevailing high fertility, which in turn reinforces the decline in living standards.” When developing countries do not make the necessary social changes to accompany industrialization, the birth rate stays high even as the economy transitions away from agriculture. These countries are slow to change their view on the ideal family size in light of emerging industrialization, and many are still engaged in labor intensive industries which reinforce the need for many children to provide free labor.

This explosive population growth has detrimental effects on both the developing country’s economy and environment. It leads to political instability, as the deluge of people overwhelm governments, causing states to fail. Governments likely cannot provide enough resources to the ever-growing population, trapping people in a cycle of poverty. Many families are impoverished due to using their resources for taking care of many children, perpetuating a cycle of poverty. 

The inability for a government to provide for its population results in a failed state. Of the 20 top failing states defined by the Failed States Index, 15 of them are growing between 2 and 4 percent a year. In 14 of those states, 40% or more of the population are under the age of 15. Large families are the norm in failing states, with women having an average of six children.

Not only does excessive population growth lead to failed states and economic problems, but it also leads to environmental problems as well. As the Global South develops, more and more people there are becoming consumers of energy and resources, contributing to climate change. In Madagascar, population growth has “triggered massive deforestation and massive species extinction.” The current rate of population growth is unsustainable in the long run economically, politically and environmentally.

However, previous efforts to decrease the birth rate in the Global South has led to the dehumanization of many women. According to Columbia professor Dr. Matthew Connelly, Americans developed programs to “motivate medical workers to insert IUDs [intrauterine devices] in more women” in South Korea and Taiwan, causing “untold misery” as there were not enough clinics to deal with the possible side effects of those procedures. Puerto Rico became a “proving ground for both the birth control pill and state-supported sterilization” due to American policy despite pushback from religious authorities. These efforts deprive women of their agency to plan their own families.

Interventions to limit population growth must ensure that families, and specifically women, have agency over their bodies. Comprehensive sexual education is an option to enable people to understand the reasons behind the different methods to decrease birth rates. Families must be able to make an informed choice on their family size, and such sexual education is a popular idea to achieve that in a humane and dignified manner.

Bryan Fok

Bryan is currently a History and Global Affairs major at the University of Notre Dame. He aims to apply the notion of Integral Human Development as a framework for analyzing global issues. He enjoys hiking and visiting national parks.

Kicking the Habit: Air Travel in the Time of Climate Change

Air travel is neither just nor sustainable. So how can environmental justice activists make a global difference?

We live in a time of far-flung relationships, our families, colleagues, and friends often spread out across continents. These relationships mirror the global nature of many of our most pressing problems, such as global climate change—and they also contribute to those problems.

In Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough Planet, Bill McKibben likens the biosphere to “a guy who smoked for forty years and then he had a stroke. He doesn’t smoke anymore, but the left side of his body doesn’t work either.” This new world, he says, requires new habits.
And, no doubt, many of us have adopted new habits—trying to use public transportation, buying local foods, rejecting bottled water. But the “savings” from such practices are wiped out by a habit that many of us not only refuse to kick, but also increasingly embrace: flying, the single most ecologically costly act of individual consumption.

Flights of Privilege

A round-trip flight between New York and Los Angeles on a typical commercial jet yields an estimated 715 kilos of CO2 per economy class passenger, according to the International Civil Aviation Organization.
 

Only 2-3 percent of the world’s population flies internationally each year, but the climate impacts are felt by a much larger—and poorer—population.

 

But due to the height at which planes fly, combined with the mixture of gases and particles they emit, conventional air travel has an impact on the global climate that’s approximately 2.7 times worse than its carbon emissions alone, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. As a result, that roundtrip flight’s “climatic forcing” is really 1,917 kilos, or almost two tons, of emissions—more than nine times the annual emissions of an average denizen of Haiti (as per U.S. Department of Energy figures).
Only 2-3 percent of the world’s population flies internationally on an annual basis, but the climate impacts of air travel are felt by a much larger—and poorer—population. It is difficult to illustrate the meaning of such numbers in terms of who among the planet’s citizens pays the costs.

But this is exactly what the 2009 German short film The Bill does in powerfully demonstrating the ecological privilege and disadvantage embodied by flying. In doing so, it shows aviation to be a classic example of how the comparatively well-off privatize benefits of environmental resource consumption (the ability to travel quickly and afar) while socializing the detriments. By making a disproportionate contribution to climate destabilization and associated forms of environmental degradation—biodiversity loss, rising sea levels, and desertification, for instance—air travelers exacerbate the precarious existence of the most vulnerable. In doing so, they contribute to unjust hierarchies (e.g. racism and imperialism) that reflect a world of profound inequality.

Global Organizing—Without Planes

Clearly this presents a huge challenge to social and environmental justice advocates, activists, and organizers from the planet’s relatively wealthy areas who often connect to distant peoples and places by flying. Because the institutions and individuals most responsible for our global predicaments typically exercise mobility and exert their power across great distances, those of us who want to challenge their practices often must also do so. So what to do?

One option is to use transportation that stays on the Earth’s surface, to accept traveling more slowly, and to make flying a very rare exception instead of the rule. Throughout North America, buses—and, in many places, trains—are viable options. And for transoceanic voyages, ships (including freight ones) are a possibility—albeit not typically inexpensive or as common as they need be.
 

Finding Rootedness

In an increasingly vulnerable world, we’re searching for rooted communities—and what we can learn from them.

Another option—indeed an obligation in a time of growing ecological destruction and a degraded resource base—is to stay home more often. Given that “jet travel can’t be our salvation in an age of climate shock and dwindling oil,” McKibben writes, “the kind of trip you can take with a click of a mouse will have to substitute.” In other words, we have to become much better at exploiting the “trips” that the Internet and related technologies afford—by videoconferencing, for example.

While such options present numerous challenges, not least logistical ones, perhaps the biggest obstacle is the particular way of seeing and being common to the small slice of the world’s population that flies regularly. Traveling long distances by bus, train, or ship, for example, necessitates time—and a willingness to expend it in manners that those from the world’s privileged parts and sectors are not used to doing. It doesn’t necessarily entail doing less, but it does mean doing things in different ways.

A New Normal

It also calls for new mechanisms and institutions—and some organizing to bring them about. Take long-distance travel by ship. Less than a century ago, many regular folks traversed the seas—think of immigrants to Angel and Ellis islands. And many well-known organizers and activists—Gandhi, Helen Keller, and W.E.B. Dubois, to name just three—journeyed extensively by ship.

To do so today, of course, is far more difficult as jet travel has greatly weakened the passenger ship option. But what if, for instance, U.S. and Canadian activists and advocates going to Denmark for the Dec. 2009 climate summit had, instead of booking individual flights, organized to travel together by ship—with all promising to get to and from their ports of call by surface-level transportation? And what if they had publicized this effort as a way of setting an example for, and challenging, others?

That such a suggestion will seem unrealistic, if not foolhardy, to many illustrates the way that what we’re used to thinking of as normal can stifle our imaginations, and let us off the political, ecological, and ethical hook. The option is as “realistic” as we make it. In this regard, we need to push and support one another in the effort to make far-reaching alternatives viable.
 

What we’re used to thinking of as normal can stifle our imaginations, and let us off the political, ecological, and ethical hook. The option is as "realistic" as we make it.

Climate science tells us that we need a 90 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions over the next few decades to keep within a safe upper limit of atmospheric carbon. In light of the great changes such a reduction demands, what is unrealistic and foolhardy is the notion that we can continue flying with abandon.
 

Interested?
    •    We thought we had 20, 30, 50 years to take on the climate crisis. We were wrong. The scary science, smart policies, and critical actions that could still avert disaster.
    •    Bill McKibben imagines himself in the year 2100, looking back at a century of climate chaos and asking: What did it take to save the world?

THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON YES MAGAZINE.

JOSEPH NEVINS

Joseph Nevins wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Joseph is a geography professor at Vassar College. Among his books is Dying to Live: A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid (City Lights Books/Open Media).

Less than Two Gallons a Day in Ethiopia

In rural Ethiopia, water is so scarce that many families survive on less than two gallons per day and walk up to four hours to find it.

Their water sources, often nearly-dry river beds or muddy holes that communities have dug together, offer water that sometimes needs to be poured through cloth to filter out leeches and debris.

Since 2007 charity: water has been working in the Tigray region of Ethiopia with the government and local water partners working towards a vision of 100% clean water coverage.

With the help of hundreds of thousands of supporters from around the world — like Noah, who taught his classmates how to weave and sold enough hand-made art to fund hand-dug wells — we’ve now funded more than 3,000 water projects in Tigray that will serve over 1.1 million people with clean and safe water near their homes. Not only that, but the community has also been trained by our local partners on safe hygiene practices and basic maintenance of their water project.

Take yourself on the charity: water journey into the heart of Ethiopia in this video series following our Content Strategist, Tyler, as he experiences life without water and meets the incredible people of Ethiopia.

THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON MAPTIA.