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LAOS: What People Cannot Eat is of Great Importance to Women – Part 2

VIENTIANE, Sep 21 2009 (IPS) - “When I was born my mother could not eat anything but tiny fish and tea made from herbs for one whole year,” says Dr Bhounsouane. “She was so weak that she could hardly walk. Post partum food taboos (phit kam) are a major problem in Laos for women,” he said.

Depending on ethnicity, taboos can last two weeks or a year, can exclude some meats, some vegetables and fruits only, or be extensive and debilitating.

This is borne out by many people and the practice is not confined to the smaller ethnic groups. A women carrying her baby from hospital in Vientiane fainted at the smell of a certain taboo vegetable, and had to be readmitted.

An Australian married to a Lao was horrified when after the birth of their child, her family insisted she lie over a bed of hot charcoal for two weeks and eat only roast chicken and rice and drink tea made from tree bark.

The ‘hot bed’ is said to close and repair the birth canal. Women fear that non-compliance will lead to illness in their children or death of the new mother. The ‘hot bed’ is considered as an opportunity to rest and regain strength, particularly women who are weak from the debilitating effects of poor nutrition and hard work.

Food taboos not only debilitate recovering women but compromise the amount and quality of breast milk. Breast feeding is often delayed until the women leave the ‘hot bed’. In the meantime the baby is given pre chewed rice by relatives, a practice identified with undersized children and infant death.

Sally Sakulku, director of U.K. NGO Health Unlimited, was at first sceptical of the dire consequences if food taboos were broken. “But when I worked at Mahoset (the major hospital in Vientiane) I saw many women being admitted with post partum anaphylaxis. Some died. It seems to be a real and unpredictable problem in Laos. I admit that I listened to my mother-in-law, and avoided a lot of foods when I had the kids.”

“I agree it needs more investigation, but it’s the mother-in-laws that have all the power. We need to educate them. Only then can women’s health improve,” said Shui Meng Ng, a sociologist and ex-UNICEF staffer.

Women and men of the Katu group in Lao’s south could identify and use over 700 separate sources of food, Jutta Krahn discovered while doing doctoral research. Her groundbreaking work indicated that traditional diets which included dry-land rice, herbs, insects, roots and tubers, forest fruits, wild animals and birds, were not only diverse, but yielded all the nutrients needed for health and well-being, particularly for women and children.

Modern Katu now eat more paddy rice and less forest foods, and are showing previously unknown vitamin and micronutrient deficiencies.

Since the 1970’s when logging and forest destruction gained commercial scale, ethnic groups such as the Katu have had their food sources seriously eroded.

“As climate change bites deeper, we will need more Katu type knowledge rather than less,” Dr Sean Foley, a human ecologist, told IPS. “Forest systems, high in biodiversity are going to be far more resilient to climate change than for instance rice, which demands water. Allowing forests to be cut for short term economic gain might be sentencing Laos to long term hunger.”

Dr Krahn from the Department of World Food Economics at Bonn University is critical of both agricultural and land use policy in Laos. She was unavailable for this story, but her writings are clear.

Krahn suggests that new food security strategies are required. Her starting point “would be the ethnic groups, their diets, and food cultures because the government and donor agencies focus too much on food production especially wetland rice.”

Hunting, swidden (slash and burn) and foraging are seen as signs of underdevelopment, of backwardness and deprivation rather than another food security choice, she wrote along with Arlyne Johnson of the World Conservation Society. To date major agricultural projects are largely focused on wet rice and livestock that favour men.

Foraging is deeply entrenched. People still forage in city gardens as they pass, snipping off edible tips and flowers. Swidden and forest foraging entail highly sophisticated forest farming of food and medicinal plants usually led by women, based on plant conservation skills acquired over hundreds of years.

Krahn’s concerns were borne out last year when donor agencies including the World Food Programme, filled a major wetland in southern Laos in order to increase rice production. What they failed to question was the role the wetlands had in local diets.

They saw a swamp; the women saw snails, fish, water weeds, frogs, eels, and edible roots to be eaten and bartered for rice. Filling the wetland resulted in protein and micronutrient malnutrition for the rice farmers, whose supply of other foods had gone, and hunger and dependency for the people who neither had goods to barter nor food to eat.

Two years ago the government announced that wetlands encircling the national capital Vientiane, were to be developed by the Chinese into a new industrial city. Thirty thousand poor urban Laos, in particular widows depend on the wetlands for food and income to buy food.

After rare public outcry, the government conceded, making far less land available. Nevertheless, the wetlands are being incrementally developed.

(*This is the second of a two-part series on chronic malnutrition in Laos. Part one focuses on structural reasons for the crisis.)