Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
In economic terms , supply of a good and demand for a good are interlinked;
producers will only supply a good that people wish to consume. In subsistence
situations, production of the good is for the family alone. In commercial situations,
the hunter/forager is supplying a good in order to meet the demand from other
households. But in all cases there are similar trade-offs to be made; people choose
to spend their productive time on hunting or farming, while consumers choose
to eat one meat rather than another. These decisions are the basis of economic
analysis.
It may appear that the livelihoods approach is philosophically very different to
the economic approach. But although livelihoods analysis may involve more
conceptual complexities (such as issues of uncertainty and culture), economic
analyses also consider trade-offs. Both approaches recognise that natural resource
use is one of a number of activities that a person could chose to engage in, the
former by placing it within a broad livelihoods context, and the latter by consider-
ing opportunity costs. Both also use similar research techniques to collect data,
including questionnaire surveys, focus groups and direct observation.
We illustrate the range of approaches using three case studies. The first looks at
both the production and consumption decisions of poor people in a village in the
Democratic Republic of Congo. The second estimates the effect of prices and
income on consumption of wild foods in Bolivia, while the third examines the effects
of various factors on consumption and food preferences on Bioko island, Equatorial
Guinea. All three are quantitative in their analytical approach, although they vary in
the degree to which they use participatory methods in obtaining the data.
3.3.2.2 The value of wild foods to extremely poor rural households in the DRC
de Merode et al .'s (2004) research questions were:
Are wild foods valuable in the study community in terms of household
consumption and sales? Rationale: this is primarily an agricultural community,
so there is a need to establish whether, and to what extent, hunting and gather-
ing wild foods contributes to their livelihoods.
Are wild foods more valuable at particular times of year? Rationale: It has been
previously shown that people use wild foods more at times of shortage of
agricultural goods.
Are wild foods more valuable for the poorest people in the community?
Rationale: It has been suggested that a key reason for considering wild foods
in any development strategy is that they are especially important for the poorest
people in society, and hence any loss of access to them would affect the most
vulnerable people.
Key elements of the experimental design :
The final sample size of 128 households was chosen following a detailed pilot
study (32 households), and represented 19% of the community. This pilot
study was an important and integral part of the research, in that it was used to
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