Kiribati Highlighted in Research
Category:UpdatesWe all know that seafood/aquatic food is a critical source of nutrients for people worldwide. They are especially so in coastal communities. However, simultaneous environmental and economic pressures are transforming many aquatic food systems, threatening access for those most reliant on aquatic foods. Understanding and strengthening the pathways through which individuals currently access all aquatic food is essential.
A new report, ‘Characterizing pathways of seafood access in small Island developing states’ (Seto, K.L et al. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2305424121), shows the primary pathways through which households in the tiny Island (but extensive EEZ) developing state of Kiribati ensure access to high levels of seafood consumption. The report suggests specific policy and management interventions to reinforce those mechanisms in the future to ensure healthy diets in the face of social and environmental change.
A survey of participants asked whether or not they consumed any of the 17 listed seafood categories. Participants with “yes” responses then had to estimate the quantity of the item consumed. Various units of measurement were accepted, and quantity estimates were converted into a standard unit (grams) by the Pacific Community (SPC) based on surveyed conversion factors. The analysis focuses on differences in household consumption of local animal-sourced seafood. Items such as tinned foods, seaweed, and unknown items were excluded.
The researchers analysed the distribution of four seafood acquisition methods (i.e., cash purchase, non-cash exchange, home production, gifting) within households in each high-seafood-consuming cluster identified above. As expected, specialized and casual fishing households obtained seafood almost exclusively through home production. At the same time, the giftees predominantly received seafood as a gift, and the wealthy consumers obtained seafood through cash purchases. Smaller households with older individuals and low technology, low effort household clusters demonstrated mixed strategies with a combination of home production, purchase, and gifting (for the smaller households with older individuals cluster) or home production, purchase, and exchange (for the low technology, low effort household cluster). This likely reflects the varying strategies the subgroups employ in each larger cluster.
The researchers analysed the amounts and types of seafood consumed by the clusters identified above to identify potential differences in seafood diets obtained through these strategies of high-consuming households. They found substantial differences in the consumption of seafood by household cluster. For example, low-technology, low-effort households ate more crab than other clusters. In contrast, wealthy consumer households ate more pelagic fish, such as tuna and wahoo, than other clusters. Some seafood, such as ark shells (Anadara maculosa or A. holoserica), known as blood cockles or “te bun” in Kiribati, were relatively equal in importance across all high-consumption households; others, such as lagoon, sand flatfish, and reef fish, were important across all clusters but were eaten more in the home producing households (i.e., specialized, and casual fishing households). Notably, there were no reports of shark consumption in wealthy consumer households, no reports of shellfish, clam, and mussel consumption in smaller, older households, and lower consumption of sea snails by giftee households than any other cluster.
In most Pacific small island developing states, local seafood resources are critical for health and nutrition. The ongoing provision of these seafood consumptive benefits relies on reinforcing the pathways to food accessibility. Which seafood is accessed? However, this analysis suggests that households only sometimes access these foods by the means typically considered in food system analyses. For example, market access is the most critical access mechanism shaping households with high seafood consumption in Kiribati. However, importantly, and perhaps counterintuitively, it is low realized market access, rather than high, associated with high seafood consumption. This finding points to the importance of supporting and maintaining traditional home production and gifting access mechanisms and challenges the assumptions underpinning many value chain analyses, which stress the importance of markets as the primary means of obtaining food. This finding may be significant to consider in similar contexts where gifting and home production represent essential forms of food access.
Further, while it is important to understand the relative importance of distinct access mechanisms across Kiribati, this aggregate analysis can obscure nuances among different household strategies. In reality, households use access mechanisms in distinct and innovative configurations to achieve high local seafood consumption under different constraints and contexts. Notably, households consume both high and low levels of local seafood across diverse contexts (e.g., geographies, development levels, market integration, etc.), suggesting that consumption of local seafood cannot be assumed based on island or village level characteristics or even household characteristics in isolation (e.g., wealth, household size). Across the nation, i-Kiribati people consume very high levels of seafood, approximating 63 kg/person/year. These high levels of seafood intake are of potential concern in exceeding toxic limits of mercury, yet can serve two critical roles in i-Kiribati diets: 1) supplying needed micronutrients like iron, zinc, calcium, and vitamin B12 that may be inadequate in other parts of the diet; and 2) displacing the consumption of more harmful meats (e.g., spam, tinned corn beef, etc.) that are high in sodium and fat and may lead to obesity.
Although seafood consumption is generally high throughout Kiribati, focusing on specific settings or characteristics can reveal key household strategies that maintain exceptionally high access to seafood. The associations between these settings and household strategies also provide valuable lessons for other contexts and case studies. For example, in urban areas, the prominent households that eat high levels of seafood are either giftees or wealthy consumers. This suggests that increasing urbanity makes wealth more critical, and social relations are potentially essential safety nets for accessing seafood. High-consumption households that rely most heavily on home production are more male-dominated.
In contrast, those who depend more on purchasing or gifting are more female dominated. This may suggest that while both male and female labor contributes essential local seafood to household consumption, the highest levels of seafood consumption through home production may be facilitated by male contributions of relatively larger bodied animals (e.g., crab; lagoon, sandflat, and reef fish vs. cockles and sea snails). While the association between female households and purchasing and gifting is notable, the directionality of this association has yet to be discovered. The research states that it may be that female-dominated households in Kiribati preferably orient toward urbanity, increasing reliance on purchasing and gifting, or it may be that in urban contexts, female-dominated i-Kiribati households prioritize the acquisition of local seafood more than male-dominated households, resulting in their designation as high-consuming households. This gendered association with household strategies in Kiribati is notable and a vital area for future research.
The specific environmental context may also shape somewhat different household strategies. For example, the low-technology, low-effort households in the Line Islands dominate the household clusters even though sampling was far higher in the Gilbert Islands chain. This suggests that this low-technology, low-effort household cluster represents an access strategy most aligned with the socioeconomic and environmental context of the Line Islands. The seafood most frequently eaten by this cluster was crab (dominated by Teeraina island), followed by lagoon and sandflat fish (dominated by Kiritimati island). Teeraina contains dense tropical coconut palm forest and is the only permanent freshwater lake in Kiribati; its lack of a lagoon, geomorphological features, and rough weather constrain ocean fishing, which may result in the observed access strategies that rely more on crabs.
Conversely, Kiritimati Island is the largest coral atoll in the world, with an expansive 388-km2 lagoon and roughly 48 km of lagoon shoreline; this likely explains the prevalence of household strategies in Kiritimati that rely heavily on lagoon and sandflat species. These associations suggest that household access strategies are strongly shaped not only by a household’s social context (e.g., size, urbanity, wealth, etc.) but also by the environmental context and the nature of locally available seafood resources. This provides insight into a key and nuanced way environmental variables may shape food systems in other resource-dependent contexts, moving beyond simple understandings of abundance or scarcity. Furthermore, the low technology, low effort household group demonstrates that in some contexts, a household need not have strong material (e.g., technology, capital), social (e.g., authority, identity), or human resource (e.g., labor) investment in home seafood production to consume high amounts of local seafood still. An important future direction for this area of research will be understanding whether and how changing resource availability reshapes access mechanisms.
Interestingly, the archetypal ways food systems conceive of accessing food do not reflect the main strategies identified in this analysis. To date, scholarship has focused on the role of built food environments (e.g., markets) and, to a lesser extent, cultivated and wild food environments (e.g., harvesting of wild foods and agriculture). These two pathways of obtaining food—purchasing and harvesting it—encompass the intuitive means by which households may benefit from food consumption. It follows that the canonical strategies of obtaining food would be through substantial investment in the technology, labor, knowledge, and social relations that would enhance home production or capital and access to markets that would strengthen purchasing power. In our analysis, these strategies are primarily reflected by specialized fishing and wealthy consumer households. However, the research presented here suggests fundamental flaws in this more canonical conceptualization, with substantial implications for how households in resource-dependent systems benefit from local seafood. Most households deploy hybrid or intermediate strategies that reflect their household contexts, demographics, and constraints. The most significant number of households of any strategy obtain seafood primarily from gifting—which does not reflect purchase or home production and thus would be largely invisible to most traditional food systems analyses. Here, the cultural gifting dynamics of Kiribati are essential in understanding which individuals and households benefit from local seafood. For example, gifting dynamics do not preferentially benefit lower-income households, older people, or households with more children; indeed, giftee households show the second-highest levels of capital and overall average demographic characteristics. Instead, gifted seafood is given most frequently to relatives outside the household, neighbours and friends, and religious authorities. This represents an essential insight into the food systems of Kiribati, and potentially those of the Pacific more broadly, as gifting dynamics are critical to the food provision of a dominant number of households. They are governed by kinship ties and religious status rather than need. Notably, however, while most households do not follow one of the two canonical strategies, those that do represent the households with the most significant household size. This may mean that for larger households, investing substantial levels of technology, labor, and knowledge into fishing or capital into purchasing to facilitate the highest levels of seafood consumption is necessary.
Household strategies differ not only in the configurations of access mechanisms they deploy to obtain high levels of seafood but also in the composition of the seafood types they consume. For example, while gleaned species like cockles are essential sources of local seafood across household types, other species are primarily consumed by households with specific access strategies, such as pelagic species by wealthy consumers and crabs by low-technology, low-effort households. Conversely, sea snails are hugely important across most household types. Still, they are rarely eaten by giftee households, and sharks are entirely missing from the consumption of wealthy consumer households. These findings are substantial as they demonstrate that household access strategies are not only crucial in shaping the overall consumptive benefit obtained by a household but also much more nuanced issues of dietary composition, which have diverse environmental (e.g., sustainability), food security (e.g., quantity, reliability) and nutritional (e.g., quality) implications. Not all seafood is the same, and seafood consumption based on species with more robust life history strategies or more selective fishing and gleaning methods may provide more sustainable seafood diets in the long run.
Similarly, species that are available year-round, easily accessible across seasons, and harvestable by individuals across demographic and socioeconomic strata (e.g., genders, wealth) are likely to provide the most reliable consumptive benefits to the most people. Finally, but critically, some seafood, such as pelagic species, may offer more nutritional benefit per gram consumed than others. These associations between configurations of access mechanisms and seafood diet composition are undervalued, with potentially substantial implications for food systems more broadly.
This research demonstrates that households successfully employ strategies to ensure access to healthy local foods even in contexts subject to profound social and environmental change. Importantly, these households achieve high levels of local seafood consumption regardless of location, wealth, age, harvesting skill, proximity to markets, or other factors. While many households rely on conventionally understood ways of accessing seafood (i.e., through purchase or home production), most households in this study obtain high levels of consumption through gifting or a hybrid of acquisition strategies.
The critical lessons of this study are twofold. First, more focus should be placed on the empirical research of realized access to food resources—how individuals and households creatively and adaptively ensure healthy diets in diverse contexts. Continued reliance on conventionally assumed pathways may omit invisible keyways where households benefit from food resources. Second, focusing on this realized access can reveal policy levers with untapped potential in improving household food access. For example, in Kiribati, gifting underpins seafood consumption by a disproportionate number of households. It is primarily conducted through kinship networks and, to a lesser degree, broader community networks. This suggests that appropriate means of ensuring access to local fish resources may unexpectedly be through improved telecommunications networks or inter-island transportation. This may be especially important for more urban areas, where gifting may be a critical safety net when purchasing or harvesting is impossible. Additionally, specific resource management approaches may also help reinforce these existing access pathways, e.g., the critical seafood underpinning local diets for home-producing households are sea snails, lagoon, and sandflat fish.
In contrast to the more commonly studied reef fish, these taxa are rarely considered in management or conservation efforts yet contribute substantially to healthy diets. In this study, it is demonstrated how households in a seafood-dependent context obtain and consume local seafood resources. Understanding these pathways is a critical first step to designing institutional or technological approaches to support these household strategies and ensure healthy diets in the face of social and environmental change.
Reference – https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2305424121