HONG KONG

Cookies and sugary drinks served at government meetings are about to go away. So are imported noodles and canned fish served in tourist bungalows.

Taking their place? Local coconuts, lobsters and lime juice.

The Torba Tourism Council in the remote Pacific island nation of Vanuatu is planning to outlaw all imported food at government functions and tourist establishments across the provinces 13 inhabited islands.

The ban, set to take effect in March, comes as many Pacific island nations struggle with an obesity crisis brought on in part by the overconsumption of imported junk food.

Luke Dini, the councils chairman and a retired Anglican priest, said the province had about 9,000 residents and got fewer than 1,000 tourists per year, mostly Europeans.

Dini said the pending ban was an effort to promote local agriculture and a response to an increase in diabetes and other diseases that council members have observed in Vanuatus capital, Port-Vila. Passing a more comprehensive ban on junk food imports to Torba could take at least two years, he added, and a final decision on which products to ban would be made by the national government.

Public health experts welcomed the ban, saying that bold measures were necessary for an impoverished and isolated region of 10 million people.

Imagine if 75 million Americans had diabetes thats the scale of the epidemic were talking about in Vanuatu, Roger Magnusson, a professor of health law and governance at Sydney Law School in Australia, said in an email.

Experts say the regions health crisis is primarily driven by a decades-long shift from traditional diets based on root crops toward ones that are high in sugar, refined starch and processed foods.

The World Bank said in a 2014 report that 52 percent of adult men in the Polynesian kingdom of Tonga were estimated to be obese the highest rate of 188 countries surveyed. It also said that of the seven countries worldwide with female obesity rates of at least 50 percent, four were Pacific island nations: Tonga, Samoa, Kiribati and the Federated States of Micronesia.

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As obesity rises, remote pacific islands plan to abandon junk food - MyAJC