Pacific islanders' fatal diet blamed on Kiwi exports

Only the choicest cuts of New Zealand lamb find their way to European dinner tables. A very different type of meat – a fatty offcut called mutton flap – is exported to the South Pacific, where it contributes markedly to the region's dire health problems.

Only the choicest cuts of New Zealand lamb find their way to European dinner tables. A very different type of meat – a fatty offcut called mutton flap – is exported to the South Pacific, where it contributes markedly to the region's dire health problems.

Mutton flap, known locally as "sipi", has become a staple protein in poor Pacific nations. While islanders regard it as a delicacy, governments have condemned New Zealand for "dumping" the inferior meat. The Prime Minister of Tonga, Ulukalala Lavaka Ata, dismissed it recently as "hardly edible".

Tonga is threatening to ban sipi – chunks of bone and fat cut off the end of top-quality chops. Also exported from Australia, it forms part of a diet blamed for the Pacific's alarmingly high rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. Fiji outlawed mutton flaps in 1999.

New Zealand's Health minister, Annette King, said it would be "morally imperious" to dictate what other countries ate. Meat producers said they were merely meeting demand.

The row illustrates the devastation wreaked on islanders' health through contact with the affluent West. Populations that once lived off fresh fish and tropical fruit eat processed foods high in salt, sugar and saturated fat. Junk food is hugely popular; the weekly flight from Auckland to the Cook Islands is known as the Kentucky Fried Chicken Express because passengers take large tubs of it home to their families.

Sipi is just one type of low-grade meat exported to the Pacific, in a practice that Rod Jackson, professor of epidemiology at Auckland University, calls "dietary genocide". Coutesy of New Zealand and Australia, islanders have acquired a taste for turkey tails – highly fatty pieces of skin – and chicken frames, or carcasses. The result is an epidemic of diet-related illnesses. In Nauru, more than half of adults have diabetes. Pacific islanders have the world's highest obesity rates; 77 per cent of adults in Nauru, 74 per cent of women in Samoa.

Professor Jackson says that people are "literally eating themselves to death". In Micronesia, where the diet is severely deficient in Vitamin A, he found that mangoes and paw-paws – which are rich in that vitamin – are fed to pigs.

A fellow epidemiologist, Robert Scragg, was equally scathing. "Australia and New Zealand have made a big song and dance over the years about French nuclear testing," he said. "Mutton flaps have caused more deaths in the Pacific than 30 years of nuclear tests."

New Zealand is paying a price, however. Many Pacific islanders exploit family links in Auckland to seek costly dialysis treatment. Medical bills are often left unpaid – and the government is threatening now to clamp down.