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Exploring Changes in Foodscapes in Western Province, Solomon Islands

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Abstract

Food connects people and place, and weaves together issues of resource use, culture, and sovereignty. In the Pacific, a ‘nutrition transition’ towards store-bought and processed food is implicated in poor health outcomes and lowered resilience. We use a mixed methods approach to explore changes in the ‘foodscape’ – the interconnections between people and food in a place – at four rural sites in Solomon Islands. Our results indicate low dietary diversity driven by a range of environmental and social factors including commercial logging. Art-based methods show that a range of components of the foodscape, including Indigenous knowledge and practice and access to land, have supported resilience to external shocks. We argue that efforts to improve nutrition outcomes should build on place-based strengths and be designed to enhance local understandings of food sovereignty.

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Data Availability Statement

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request and subject to permission from community leaders at the sites.

Notes

  1. The workshops focused on women because their diets tend to align with those of their wider household (FAO and FHI 360 2016).

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Acknowledgements

This work was conducted on the customary land- and sea-scapes of tribal owners at the four sites. The research team gratefully acknowledges the leaders and community members in Solomon Islands who gave permission for this work and guided it throughout. In particular, Julie Belavaqara, Rayliss Luluta, and Bernadette Pae made invaluable contributions to data collection. Thanks too to Chris Filardi, Amanda Sigouin, John Clemo, and two anonymous reviewers for inspiration and edits that drove the final product.

We honour the memory of our friend and co-author Eleanor J. Sterling (1960-2023), whose vision, facilitation, patience, and determination drove this work. May her leadership be a source of inspiration for all of us to find new ways to support biocultural conservation. She is profoundly missed.

The material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grants No. EF-1427091 and 1444184. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. In addition, this research was supported by the Assessing Biocultural Indicators Working Group supported in part by SNAPP: Science for Nature and People Partnership, a collaboration of The Nature Conservancy, the Wildlife Conservation Society and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Generous support for this project also comes from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Lynette and Richard Jaffe, the Jaffe Family Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (grant 13-105118-000-INP), and the Tiffany & Co. Foundation.

Funding

All findings were published locally in 2018 to ensure they were useful and used at the sites, including in large-format visual descriptions of the work and in-depth ethnobotanical descriptions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, American Museum of Natural History, New York City, NY, USA

    Joe McCarter, Georgina Cullman, Erin Betley, Ned Horning, Hara Woltz & Eleanor J. Sterling

  2. Natural Resources Group, NYC Parks, NY, USA

    Georgina Cullman

  3. School of Civil Engineering, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

    Simon Albert

  4. WorldFish, Solomon Islands Programme, Honiara, Solomon Islands

    Joelle Albert

  5. Independent, Gizo, Solomon Islands

    Piokera Holland

  6. Melanesia Program, Wildlife Conservation Society, Suva, Fiji

    Stacy D. Jupiter

  7. Independent, Munda, Solomon Islands

    Miri Taqu

  8. Hawai’i Institute of Marine Biology, University of Hawai’i at Manoa, Hawaii, USA

    Eleanor J. Sterling

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  1. Joe McCarter
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Correspondence to Joe McCarter.

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Ethical Approval

All work followed strict ethical guidelines based on the International Society of Ethnobiology’s Code of Ethics (ISE, 2006), and was approved by the AMNH Institutional Review Board (FWA00006768). The ethics procedure included a continuous process of securing free, prior, and informed consent from participants.

Informed Consent

Consent at each of the sites was based on discussion of the short-, medium-, and long-term benefits of the project, which included assistance with planning and adaptation, relevant research work such as documentation of valued plants, and the direct financial benefits from team accommodation and meals. All assistants contributing significant time to project activities (defined as > 3 h) were compensated for their time at the rates set by the SICCP.

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McCarter, J., Cullman, G., Betley, E. et al. Exploring Changes in Foodscapes in Western Province, Solomon Islands. Hum Ecol 51, 483–496 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-023-00419-8

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