Insects are untapped livestock, says expert

MANILA, Philippines – In an era of growing food scarcity and insecurity, insects present an untapped livestock that humans can supplement their diets with in the near future.

Julian Cribb, the author of the book titled The Coming Famine, said more people are going to turn to indigenous vegetables and other possible food sources such as insects to fill up their bellies.

Cribb, principal of an agriculture consultancy firm Julian Cribb & Associates, conducted a lecture at the Asian Development Bank (ADB) on Tuesday, October 16. He said the world needs to double food production to feed a projected 9 billion people worldwide by 2050 onwards.

He said this will be difficult considering that the world is now faced with dwindling resources such as water, land, and even energy resouces such as oil.

“Yes, you can grow them in farm, the Chinese are already doing this. You go to a market in China, they’re full of crickets and bumblebees, locusts and God knows what that are actually being reared and they use crop waste. So if you got a hold of old vegetables, you can feed them to animals, you can feed them to insects,” Cribb told Rappler at the sidelines of his lecture on World Food Day.

“Inects are quite nutritious, they’re quite crunchy. It’s a cultural thing. Worldwide, cultures are homogenized so most Westerners or Filipinos would not want to eat insects but in 100 years time, they may have a different attitude,” he added.

Changing diets

Cribb said eventually, people’s diets are going to change to adapt to changing world food production. This is where insects and unknown vegetables come in, he said.

He said there are 1,500 edible insects in Asia alone and that many countries like China have already begun cooking and serving insects as street food.

In terms of vegetables, he said there are also 25,000 unknown species of plants that can be consumed. Discovering these would make eating more an adventure than a mere act of survival.

In the Philippines, the government through the Bureau of Plant Industry (BPI) is promoting the propagation and consumption of indigenous vegetables. These are Malunggay, Alugbati, Saluyot, Kulitis, Talinum, Ampalayang Ligaw, Labong, Katuray, Pako and Himbabao.

“We have not yet begun to explore this planet in terms of its culinary potential or its agricultural potential. Many of these are eaten by indigenous societies but nobody else knows about them, some of them people haven’t event tried eating at all. We have got to explore our home planet before we get too much on processed food, many of these things are very healthy,” Cribb said.

Invest now

Cribb said the most important thing to do right now is for governments to double, even quadruple its investments in agriculture, particularly on doing and disseminating Research and Development outputs.

This will not only make up for all the years that governments have put agriculture aside but also ensure that by 2050, when a global famine is expected to hit, governments are ready to respond with new technologies that will ensure food for all.

Cribb said it is also necessary for countries to explore these opportunities:

• The need to recycle all our wasted water and nutrients back into food production, creating a entire new industry;
• The need to develop a sustainable energy source for agriculture, so it can escape the next oil crisis;
• The development of climate-proof urban agriculture in cities worldwide;
• The development of novel, healthier foods using new scientific methods, to avoid the growing death toll from diet-related diseases (which now affects half of all people who are well off);
• Dramatic potential to expand fish farming and the farming of algae (for food, livestock feed, biofuels, fine chemicals and pharmaceuticals) into huge global industries; and
• The chance to expand and enhance the world diet and cuisine by exploring the planet’s 25,000 edible plants – most of which we do not, as yet, eat.

Cities’ food demand to skyrocket

Cribb said these investments will greatly be needed to ensure food supply in countries, particularly in megacities like those in northern China and the Philippines.

By 2050, these megacities like Guangzhou and Shanghai will have populations in the order of 120 million people.

Metro Manila will also be one of these cities and is expected to have a population of around 40 million by that time. This is more than 3 times the night population of Metro Manila of 11.5 million today.

As it is, Cribb said Metro Manila requires 6,000 tons of food daily to feed its population, a number that is expected to double to 12,000 tons by 2050. To date, Metro Manila does not produce even a percent of its food requirement.

“To feed a city like Manila, you need 6,000 tons of food every single day and the food for these giant cities arrives on a river of trucks, every night to re-stock the shops. Now what happens if that river is disrupted? Maybe there’s an oil crisis, may be there’s a local war, maybe there’s just big floods like the one in Bangkok, a city of 10, 20, 30 million people will face starvation within days,” Cribb said. – Rappler.com