Food Practices in Transition: A Literature Review on Nutrition Change, Urbanisation, and Food Security in Port Vila, Vanuatu
Introduction
There is something discretely striking about Port Vila’s food commerce. Alongside piles of taro, laplap wrapped in banana leaves, and fish still carrying the cold of the sea, across the road you will find instant noodles, canned corned beef, and bottles of local tea and lemon juice, sweetened drinks that have become, for many children, the most reliable source of daily sugar. This coexistence is not incidental. It is the material trace of decades of layered transformation: colonial history, postcolonial urbanisation, global trade, climate pressure, and the ongoing negotiation between kastom and the cash economy.
This literature review draws on twenty-four sources spanning ethnographic fieldwork, quantitative nutrition studies, policy reports, trade analyses, and disaster research. It is organised around five themes: the drivers of nutrition transition; the changing urban food environment; the persistence of traditional food practices; the social and cultural meanings of food; and the structural forces, trade liberalisation, climate change, disaster response, that frame food security outcomes. The argument running through all of them is that food practices in Port Vila are neither simply traditional nor straightforwardly modern. They are continually negotiated between customary social systems, global market forces, and the economic realities of urban life, and it is that negotiation which the Foodscapes ethnographic project sets out to document.
1. Nutrition Transition in Vanuatu and the Pacific
I use ‘nutrition transition’ to describe a dietary shift away from traditional, locally produced foods toward energy-dense, nutrient-poor processed and imported products, driven not by a sudden change in taste but by the slow restructuring of economies, supply chains, and urban life. The 2010 Pacific Food Summit report provides a regional baseline, identifying increasing dependence on imported foods, declining local food production, and rising rates of obesity and diabetes across twenty-one Pacific Island countries. Urbanisation appears throughout as a primary driver, contributing not only to greater reliance on purchased food but to the erosion of traditional agricultural knowledge that once anchored food production at the household level.
Foy (1992, 1993) documents this process in Vanuatu with rare historical clarity. By the early 1990s, urban diets had already become heavily reliant on imported rice, not because people had developed a cultural preference for it, but because economic logic had made it the cheapest available calorie source for the urban poor. Foy’s work repositions the nutrition transition away from narratives of modernity and toward something more structurally determined: people eat what they can afford, and what they can afford is increasingly imported. He also shows that tariffs on rice failed to shift consumption while raising the cost burden on low-income households, an early demonstration of how blunt trade policy can harm the people it is designed to protect.
The structural logic Foy identifies has deepened since. Jones and Charlton find that meeting WHO-recommended fruit and vegetable intake would consume 26% of the average household food budget in urban Port Vila, rising to 67% for the poorest households. These are not people making poor food choices. They are people choosing basic sustenance. Dike (2023) translates this into a clinical picture among Port Vila schoolchildren: high caries rates, widespread consumption of local tea, and shortfalls in calcium, vitamin A, and vitamin C. Caloric adequacy coexists with micronutrient deficiency, the dual burden that flows directly from diets dominated by imported refined carbohydrates. Dache et al. (2020) trace the same trajectory in a peri-urban community adjacent to Port Vila, documenting a clear garden-to-store shift driven by cash demands, time scarcity, land pressure, and cheap processed imports. Lebot and Simeoni (2015), comparing six villages across Vanuatu, confirm that food system vulnerability is not primarily caused by land degradation but by sociocultural change: cash cropping, market integration, and a drift toward imported foods. Food systems are not failing because the land has run out. They are changing because the conditions that once made them viable are themselves being transformed.
2.The Urban Food Environment: Access, Affordability, and Infrastructure
To understand why Port Vila’s food environment looks the way it does, you need to look at forces shaping it from both above and below: the global trade architecture determining what arrives in shops, and the urban conditions determining who can grow, buy, or share food locally. Ravuvu et al. (2021) examine the structural top through trade policy analysis, showing that Vanuatu’s WTO accession has been closely associated with increased importation of ultra-processed foods and rising foreign direct investment in food processing. Tariff and excise mechanisms have limited effectiveness in reversing these trends. The food environment is being reshaped by international trade commitments and corporate investment in ways that largely bypass national governments. Dietary change in Vanuatu is not merely a local story.
From the other end of the supply chain, Langford (2022) examines how remoteness and socioeconomic conditions in West Ambae shape what food actually reaches Port Vila from rural areas. Remote households produce more subsistence food but are poorly connected to markets. The result is structural: the declining availability of locally produced traditional foods in the capital reflects not consumer preference but the constraints of rural production systems, uneven transport, and weak market linkages. The urban food environment becomes import-dependent partly by default.
The physical city is also a food environment. The UN-Habitat and RMIT University (2015) climate vulnerability assessment finds that urban expansion and the growth of informal settlements are reducing household access to productive land, clean water, and coastal resources. More than half of Port Vila households continue some level of home food production, but these practices are under increasing pressure from land tenure insecurity and environmental degradation. Komugabe-Dixson et al. (2019) reach similar conclusions, documenting how pollution, population growth, and environmental change are eroding the ecosystem services, land for gardens, marine resources, that many households depend on to supplement purchased food.
3.Persistence and Adaptation of Traditional Food Practices
The Port Vila literature resists a simple replacement narrative. Food systems do not work like software updates. What the evidence shows, repeatedly, is coexistence, adaptation, and negotiation: traditional food practices persisting and finding new forms within the changing urban environment rather than vanishing under its pressure.
Drake et al. (2022) provide the most systematic evidence through their ethnographic case study of Ambae Island migrants in Port Vila. Approximately 89% of households surveyed grow some food, and 88% report recently sharing food beyond their immediate household. Gift exchange, market transactions, subsistence production, and hybrid arrangements coexist and interact. Traditional economy practices have not been displaced by the cash economy. They operate alongside it. MacKenzie (2022) tests this resilience through COVID-19: when the tourism economy collapsed and formal incomes disappeared almost overnight, people in peri-urban Port Vila turned back to gardening with renewed intensity. But MacKenzie notes the vulnerability of this response. As land values rise and planning regulations fail to protect productive peri-urban landscapes, the capacity for this kind of adaptive buffer is being steadily eroded.
Petrou and Connell (2016) trace food and remittance flows between Paama Island and Port Vila, finding that food is a medium of kinship maintenance and moral obligation across rural-urban distances. Traditional foods move from Paama to Port Vila while imported rice moves in the reverse direction. The value of the exchange lies less in what is transferred than in what the transfer enacts: relationship, obligation, belonging. Lindstrom et al. (2024) introduce a more sobering note. Their study of customary usufruct arrangements for Tanna migrants documents how historically migrants accessed garden land through kastom agreements with indigenous landowners. As urban land values have risen, many landowners have shifted toward commercial rents, cutting migrants off from garden space. Urban economic transformation does not simply overlay existing practices. It actively dismantles the institutional foundations that made them possible.
4.Social and Cultural Meanings of Food Under Urbanisation
Food in Port Vila is never only food. It is a language for kinship, obligation, identity, and belonging, and one of the most consistent findings across the literature is how profoundly the meaning of that language is being renegotiated. To trace these changes is to trace something fundamental about what it means to live in this city, which is exactly what Foodscapes is trying to do.
Kraemer’s ethnographic work in Freswota captures this renegotiation at the household level. Urbanisation and unemployment have strained traditional kin-based food sharing, with food access becoming increasingly conditional on economic contribution, on a person’s perceived productive input to the household. The empty saucepan idiom she analyses captures this with force: food is no longer simply what you give to family because they are family. It has become a test of membership in a moral economy structured around wage labour and cash. Young unemployed men experience this as a form of social abandonment, excluded not just from meals but from the networks of care and belonging that meals represent.
Rio (2017) theorises a related dynamic through fenced households and small home-based stores in Port Vila settlements. These are responses to the pressure of Melanesian demand-sharing, the culturally embedded expectation that resources will be freely shared among kin and neighbours. By creating bounded spaces and monetising access to goods, households seek to protect their economic survival while remaining embedded in kinship networks. The fence is not a rejection of community. It is a strategy for surviving within it. But it marks a real shift in how food moves through social space, from an open reciprocal resource to something managed and accessed increasingly through exchange.
Wentworth (2016) turns attention to community feasting as both safety net and social stage. Children from food-insecure households attend community feasts to supplement inadequate food at home, making private food scarcity publicly visible. Feasting spaces function as informal support systems but are also sites of observation and gossip, where inequality is legible to everyone present. Food insecurity is not just a material condition. It is a socially mediated, publicly felt experience shaped by cultural norms about care and what it means to be a good family. This is not what food security indicators typically measure, but it is a crucial part of what food security actually means.
Kraemer’s (2020) later work on urban identity formation shows some Port Vila youth constructing place-based belonging, a man town identity, that is increasingly independent of island origin and rural kastom. As younger generations become less connected to rural gardens, inter-island networks, and the traditional knowledge that structured how food was grown and exchanged, the cultural substrate sustaining those practices erodes. The garden-to-store transition is not only economic. It is also a story about belonging and what home now means.
5.Structural Forces: Trade, Disaster, Climate, and Governance
Zoom out far enough from any household kitchen in Port Vila and you reach the structural forces shaping what is available to cook in the first place. These forces, trade agreements, disaster response systems, climate change, governance frameworks, are often invisible in everyday food practice, but they are never absent from it.
Ravuvu et al. (2021) make the trade architecture visible. Ultra-processed foods are now more widely available and often more affordable than traditional alternatives, not because people prefer them, but because global trade and investment systems have made it so. The tools available to a small Pacific nation to reshape its food environment are genuinely constrained by its position in the global trade order. Wentworth (2020) shows what this looks like during a crisis. Food aid after Cyclone Pam, predominantly white rice, tinned meat, and instant noodles, directly contradicted Vanuatu’s own campaigns promoting local food consumption. Families who had maintained some commitment to traditional diets became reliant on imported food aid, and that reliance persisted beyond the emergency. The humanitarian system, designed to help, effectively accelerated the nutrition transition. Food security cannot be understood only in terms of caloric adequacy. Cultural appropriateness and long-term dietary outcomes matter too.
Climate change operates as a slower structural force. The UN-Habitat/RMIT (2015) assessment and Komugabe-Dixson et al. (2019) document how flooding, sea-level rise, cyclones, and changing rainfall patterns threaten urban infrastructure, coastal resources, and peri-urban agricultural land. Dache et al. (2020) show that climate shocks produce severe food insecurity even in rural communities with otherwise robust traditional food systems. Climate change does not intensify food insecurity uniformly. It interacts with urbanisation, market integration, and social structure to produce outcomes that are complex and uneven. Against this, Drake et al. (2022) offer an instructive counterpoint: when Ambae experienced volcanic disaster, community networks in Port Vila mobilised to ship food and water through church associations and kinship networks, parallel to and faster than formal state and NGO channels. The traditional economy is not emergency improvisation. It is an enduring institutional capacity.
Conclusion
Food is one of the most ordinary things people do, and that is exactly why it reveals so much. The literature reviewed here shows that in Port Vila, what ends up on the table is shaped by global trade agreements, colonial land arrangements, climate events, kinship obligations, and the price of rice.. In Port Vila these tensions can be tangibly seem, in the same kitchen, at the same meal.
That convergence is what makes this city worth studying closely. The shifts documented here, toward imported food, away from subsistence production, toward more conditional forms of sharing, are real and consequential. But they are also incomplete, contested, and in many cases only partially visible in survey data and policy reports. Ethnographic fieldwork can get closer to how people actually experience and navigate these changes, and that is what Foodscapes sets out to do.
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