Wild Foods - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 473

Chapter 19
Wild Foods
Jules Pretty and Zareen Pervez Bharucha
Introduction
Wild foods lie at the nexus between biodiversity conservation, food security, and pov-
erty alleviation. The evidence reviewed in this chapter shows that for agricultural com-
munities worldwide, and particularly those most vulnerable to hunger and poverty, wild
biodiversity on and near farms provides a vital source of food security and income.
In parallel with the much-publicized global food crisis, the year 2010 marked the UN's
International Year of Biodiversity. Biodiversity contributes to food security via the thou-
sands of uncultivated, wild edible species that still form a part of the diets of roughly
a billion people (Aberoumand 2009). It also contributes to poverty reduction through
improvements to public health, income generation, and adaptive capacity. In this way,
species conservation is linked with wider development goals (Emerton 2009).
The global discourse on food security is overwhelmingly concerned with increasing
agricultural productivity. However, despite considerable progress over several decades,
a large number of people remain undernourished. By recent estimates (Foresight 2011),
the global undernourished population currently numbers about one billion. In addi-
tion, some two billion people are estimated to suffer from micronutrient malnutrition
(Bouis and Welch 2010, Tulchinsky 2010). The nutritional status of children is a particu-
lar concern—those from the poorest households are twice as likely to be underweight
as those from the richest, and rural children are more likely to be underweight than
urban (UN 2013). Globally, 26 percent of children under five in the developing world are
underweight (UN 2009). This is of special concern, since the effects of micronutrient
deficiencies, particularly in early life, ultimately “foster persistent poverty, reinforcing
the consequences of food insecurity” (Barrett 2010, 827). Globally, the provision of forti-
fied foods and nutrient supplements has been the foremost strategy for the alleviation
of micronutrient malnutrition. Several nutritional analyses of wild foods have docu-
mented their current and potential role in providing valuable nutritional supplements
to those who depend on them.