Fighting climate change with traditional methods
Ensuring food security on the Cook Islands
by Bronwen Neil, Macquarie University/CAPAS-Fellow
In an era marked by the looming specter of climate change, food security is a major concern, posing a substantial threat to the traditional ways of life and the stability of urban and rural systems around the world. In response to this pressing challenge, on Mangaia, the southernmost island of the Cook Islands archipelago, an ancient tradition known as Ra'ui has recently been reintroduced in order to sustain Mangaia’s natural food supplies.
Ra’ui is a cultural ban used to protect and conserve food supplies and species of cultural significance to the people of the Cook Islands. It seems to have been used for several centuries across Polynesia before the arrival of Europeans and has continued in the past 200 years to make a sustainable lifestyle possible on this remote island of the Pacific. In the Cook Islands, it is used to preserve seafood, plant and animal foods, and to replenish animal and bird populations that are not eaten but have cultural significance.
Ra’ui has recently been reintroduced as a community practice on Mangaia, one of the oldest Pacific Islands (and the oldest with exposed volcanic rock). This brief article contains some reflections on the ways that traditional customs of care are making Mangaia’s natural food supplies sustainable in the coming decades, during the era of climate change, which some might call an apocalyptic threat to their way of life.
In Mangaia, traditional ways of preserving and conserving food sources are still practiced as part of a Polynesian mode of subsistence, a way of life that traces its origins back to 800-1200 CE. Coconut crabs, parrot fish and the Mangaian kingfisher have been protected and allowed to flourish by periods of non-harvesting, known as ra’ui.
The Mangaian kingfisher was on the endangered list (the ‘Red List’ of the International Union for Conservation of Nature) until the ra’ui was imposed some years ago. Now it is off the danger list and doing well. Likewise, the number of young parrot fish is increasing as they are allowed to grow bigger before being taken from the sea in some areas of Mangaia’s coastline. The huge coconut crabs, which can climb trees and knock down coconuts to open the coconuts lying on the forest floor, have also been protected and saved for when they are needed most, when big feasts are laid on for family, guests, and official visitors.
The collection of data on the successful use of ra’ui on Mangaia over the last five years shows how Cook Island people can still work together collectively to protect and guarantee the security of their food sources. Even as sea levels are rising in the Pacific and ocean temperatures are climbing due to climate change, Mangaian people have been able to use traditional knowledge to protect their most vulnerable species, which for them is a matter of survival.
Across the Pacific, local people, scientists, and academics from other fields are working to bring together scientific and cultural data for the successful management of future food resources that are threatened by the impacts of climate change. Scholars in the humanities – including local historians, anthropologists, creative artists, and geographers – have a role to play in recovering traditional knowledges in the fields of Pacific ecology, its peoples’ care for land and sea, and in studies of its rare animal, plant, and bird species.
Thanks to the “Te Puna Marama Voyaging Foundation” and the “Okeanos Foundation for the Sea”, which supported our research.
