Low-Hanging Fruit

Forests complement farming to secure food for the rural poor, but this requires finding a balance between forest conservation and converting forestland to agriculture.

While there are trade-offs between conserving forests and converting forestland to agricultural uses, forest ecosystems offer countless goods and services that contribute to human nutrition, rural livelihoods, agricultural productivity and sustainability, and climate change adaptation and mitigation. As such, they provide "low-hanging fruit" to be marshaled in the service of food security.

Forests are a direct source of food and cash income for more than a billion of the world's poorest people, providing both staple foods such as sago and supplemental foods such as fruits and nuts. More than 50 million people in India alone depend directly on forests for subsistence. Some communities in Southeast Asia are almost entirely dependent on forest foods.

Rural communities also rely on forests for cash income to buy food. Forest products can help farm households diversify their sources of income, manage risk and survive when crop yields are low.

The significance of forest-based income to rural households - and thus to their food security - can be great. For some households in Mozambique, cash from unprocessed forest products such as fuelwood, fruits, mushrooms, insects, honey and medicinal plants constitutes 30% of household income.

"Trees produce in years when agriculture doesn't," says Louis Verchot, an ecologist at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR). "Forests provide reserve food stores that serve local populations in crisis years. They buffer against production risks like failed harvests by providing fruits, roots and tubers. In a really bad year, you can always liquidate a portion of your trees and sell the wood to raise cash to purchase food."

In East Kalimantan, Indonesia, for example, marginalized communities rely regularly on sago starch harvested from primary forests when drought causes crops to fail.

Research shows that forests also provide valuable support services for agriculture, Verchot adds. Forests help to maintain rainfall and other weather patterns, enhance soil and water quality, control pests, and provide crops and livestock with protection from the elements. Tropical agriculture relies on wild pollination, for which trees and forests are very important.

Climate change, which poses a serious threat to future food security, will lend greater importance to forests' function as a safety net for the rural poor.

As climate change takes effect, rural communities will become increasingly vulnerable to crop failure caused by disruptions to familiar weather patterns and shifting distributions of crop diseases and pests.

Healthy forests can help buffer the impacts of extreme weather events, whose frequency and severity are projected to rise with global warming. Forests are also important as carbon sinks, soaking up atmospheric carbon and storing it in trees and soils. Deforestation and forest degradation releases this carbon into the atmosphere, contributing to climate change.

Indeed, reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) has emerged as a key approach in the fight against climate change, as discussed in detail in Realising REDD+, published by CIFOR in December 2009.

Despite the contributions that forests make to food security, this role is underappreciated, and past attempts to secure food supplies have often destroyed forests. Indeed, agricultural expansion for food crops, pasture and tree plantations is the greatest cause of forest clearance.

In Brazil, the biggest forest losses are to clearing for cattle ranching, while in Southeast Asia significant areas of forest have been converted to oil palm. Aquaculture development has also had an impact, converting tropical mangrove forests into fish and shrimp ponds.

However, not all conversions of forests to agriculture are disastrous. While most deforestation is caused by industrial-scale agriculture, all over the world smallholders have improved their circumstances by opening forestland for farms. Clearing forests to make way for agriculture makes sense in some cases, but not in others. Converting forests to other uses always entails losses in ecosystems services, and trade-offs between those losses and productivity gains should be weighed explicitly, with due attention to local conditions.

To achieve household, community and global food security, a balance needs to be found between forest conservation and committing land to agriculture. Decisions about managing land for food, fiber and agrofuel production need to take into account the direct and indirect contributions of forests to food security.