Wild Foods - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 474

Recent food and economic crises made matters substantially worse (FAO 2009; UN
2009). Especially hard-hit have been countries of sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia
(excluding China).
Of those who have inadequate access to food, many are primarily involved in the pro-
duction of food. It is partly for this reason that the literature on vulnerability, food secu-
rity, and ecosystem services has tended to emphasize the value of food production from
agriculture (MEA 2005; Ericksen et al. 2009), and tends to neglect the contribution of
wild foods. At the regional and national level, food balances (calculated from data on
household-level food production and consumption) guide policies on food trade, the
declaration of food crises, and food aid. Notably absent from such balances is the con-
tribution made by the on- and off-farm collection of wild foods for either consumption
or sale. Yet, for some communities and social groups, wild products constitute a vital
resource, especially during times of food shortage. It is clear from these studies and pre-
vious assessments (Scoones et al. 1992; Etkin 1994; Pretty 1995; Heywood 1999; MEA
2005; Kuhnlein et al. 2009; Bharucha and Pretty 2010) that nonfarmed and apparently
wild biodiversity deserves inclusion in food security assessments and policy.
Around one billion people use wild foods in their diets (Aberoumand 2009). Forests
provide livelihoods and food for some 300 million people in the form of non-timber for-
est products (NTFPs). In general, food security and NTFPs are strongly interlinked in
rural communities, especially for the most vulnerable groups (Belcher et al. 2005), even
among agricultural communities (Vincetti et al. 2008). Urban communities also rely on
wild foods. For instance, affluent urban households are willing to pay 43 to 157 percent
more for bushmeat in Zambia and Mozambique (Barnett, 2000). In Rajasthan, India,
wild foods benefit both urban and rural children (Rathore 2009). Titus et al. (2009)
explored the importance of wild game in Alaska, where 80 percent of the population is
urban, and found urban households routinely consuming significant amounts of wild
game. Jaarsveld et al. (2005) cite estimates on the largely underreported role of wild
foods in food and nutritional security across the southern African region. These range
from 0.1 percent in South Africa to 8.5 percent in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Ninety percent of all African off-take occurs through subsistence hunting and gathering.
The reliance on forest products for food or income is greatest for those most at risk of
malnutrition and hunger, even among agricultural communities (Vincetti et al. 2008).
In general, the rural poor are found to have a “disproportionately high” dependence
on NTFPs under certain conditions (Belcher et al. 2005). Within the sixty-one cases of
NTFP use examined by Belcher et al., “even commercial NTFP producers tend to be
poor or very poor compared to national averages” (2005, 1443).
With the routine underestimation of the role of wild edible plants in diets comes the
danger of not recognizing the importance of provisioning ecosystems and support-
ive local knowledge systems that sustain these food chains (Grivetti and Ogle, 2000;
Mazhar et al. 2007; Pilgrim et al. 2007, 2008). A more comprehensive understanding of
the combined use of cultivated and uncultivated species has led some to call for a revi-
sion of the current understandings of terms such as “agriculture,” “food security” and
“common property resources” (Mazhar et al. 2007).