Appetite for Freedom: Towards Food Sovereignty and Health Empowerment in a Postcolonial Marshall Islands

Abstract

The Republic of the Marshall Islands has endured a long, tumultuous history of colonisation and imperialism. Located in the Northern Pacific Ocean, as a part of Micronesia, the country and its national identity has become a cultural pastiche of postcolonial hybridity. While to some this represents progress, the reconstruction of Marshallese identity in this emerging era of globalisation has indeed had questionable repercussions – one particularly compelling one being the ‘Americanisation’ of the food system. Accordingly, national health has taken a turn for the worse, with non-communicable diseases, such as Type II diabetes, being brought to the forefront as leading causes of death in the nation. This thesis charts the evolution of the postwar food system in the Marshall Islands and explores some nutrition education and health promotion practices in this context. In doing so, it seeks to deconstruct the various scales upon which certain discourses around food, health and wellbeing are digested, resisted and lived. By merging the social and medical scientific worlds, the research applies a critical perspective to conceptualise the convoluted reality of how personal, national and global histories, geographies and politics meet to establish unique and multifaceted contexts that need equally unique and multifaceted policies and praxis to overcome certain struggles. The research is based upon a series of interviews and other critical qualitative fieldwork that was carried out during July and August of 2014 in the urban centre and capital island of Majuro. Additionally, it reflects upon the author’s experiences and observations while living in the rural outer island community of Arno on Arno Atoll. It therefore aims to weave personal narrative with conventional research methods to ground a critical argument in tangible reality. The thesis argues that given the postcolonial context, nutrition education is more than simply a task of indoctrinating the adoption of ‘healthier’ practices at a widespread scale. Nutritionally devoid and processed foods have, over several generations, become embedded within notions of Marshallese identity, meaning that recent health trends are in chief associated with a sense of disengagement of local people with their food choices. Nutrition education must therefore focus on projects that reclaim local food sovereignty and inspire processes of self-discovery and empowerment rather than traditional teacher-student, command-and-control tactics. Keywords: Marshall Islands; food sovereignty; health; nutrition; Freirean theory; empowerment; postcolonial development