Forests and food security in the Amazon: What a new study compels us to examine more closely
In the Amazon, the word "food" almost never refers only to food. Sometimes it's a fish that arrives when the river rises and overflows. Sometimes it's a cassava that is saved from flooding. Sometimes it's a bunch of plantain that holds out for a few more weeks, or a long walk to find what the bush still offers. And, increasingly, “food” is also a price: what rice costs at the store, how much oil goes for when transport is delayed, what can be bought when cash falls short.
- Forest landscape restoration
- food security
- gender and food security
Forests and food security in the Amazon: What a new study compels us to examine more closely
In the Amazon, the word "food" almost never refers only to food. Sometimes it's a fish that arrives when the river rises and overflows. Sometimes it's a cassava that is saved from flooding. Sometimes it's a bunch of plantain that holds out for a few more weeks, or a long walk to find what the bush still offers. And, increasingly, “food” is also a price: what rice costs at the store, how much oil goes for when transport is delayed, what can be bought when cash falls short.
That mix – forest, river, chagra, and market – is difficult to capture in a single figure. This is why, when we talk about food security, simply saying there “is” or “is not” enough falls short. Food security has multiple dimensions: the availability of food, the ability to access it, its nutritional utilization, and the stability of all these factors over time, even as seasons shift. This is what makes measuring it so complex – and so urgent.
A study led by Alliance researchers and published in Food Security addresses that complexity with a question as simple as it is pressing: does living closer to the forest make a household more secure in the face of food uncertainty? The team's short answer is "yes, but not always in the same way." The full answer is more interesting: the effect depends on the quality of the forest, the food culture, and whether it is rainy or dry season. And they say so with data from Indigenous and mestizo households in two places where the forest still sets the pace of life: La Pedrera (Amazonas, Colombia) and Ucayali (Peru).