ABSTRACT
Abstract The principle adopted here is that factors pending to increase food and/or in come for economically marginal rural families, while decreasing pressure for land clearing, pesticides, and intensive agriculture, will tend to favor preserva tion of biodiversity and sustainable future. The great diversity of habitats of insect species that serve as traditional foods presents an almost endless diver sity of situations in which recognition and enlightened management of the food insect resource can result not only in better human nutrition, but simultaneously aid in maintaining diversity of habitats for other forms of life. Approaches in clude: 1) enhancing forest conservation and management by acting on the de sire of local populations for protection of traditional insect foods (i.e., caterpil lars in Zambia and Zaire); 2) reducing poaching in parks and wildlife preserves by allowing sustainable use of the food insect resources by the local people (i.e., caterpillars in Malawi); 3) reducing pesticide use by developing more efficient methods of harvesting pest species that are traditional foods (i.e., grasshoppers); 4) increasing environmental and economic efficiency by developing dual prod uct systems (i.e., silks and silk moth larvae/pupae, honey and honeybee brood); 5) reducing organic pollution by recycling agricultural and forestry wastes into high-quality food or animal feedstuffs (i.e., fly larvae, palm weevils). Other rel evant considerations are that some edible insect species enhance their local en vironment in various ways (i.e., leafcutter ants in S. America) or create addi tional diversity of species within the habitat (i.e., termites in Africa). Some, as shown in studies with crickets exhibit considerably higher food conversion effi ciency than beef cattle when fed diets of similar quality. Finally, there is need for research on industrial scale mass production of edible insects, for increased rec ognition of the nutritional and environmental importance of insects by national
governments, and for increased involvement of Western media and academia in dispelling unfounded cultural biases in the Western World toward insects as food.
