Wild Foods - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 476

domesticated food species (Headland 1987; Bailey et al. 1989). The “wild yam question”
led to debate and assorted studies within ecological anthropology. Some of these have
indicated that some tropical forest sites support hunter-gatherer communities without
recourse to any cultivated food. In others, communities rely on both entirely “wild” as
well as semidomesticated food species (Headland 2002).
With no easy distinctions between the cultivated and the wild, or between farmers
and hunter-gatherers, it becomes clear that there is a huge variety of subsistence strate-
gies that vary spatially as well as over time (Kelly 1995). These strategies allow for the
management of nonfarm landscapes in order to increase the productivity and stability
of useful plants and animals.
The Management of Nonagricultural
Environments
What is also clear is that farmers, hunters, gatherers, fishers, and foragers do not simply
take resources from a compliant environment. They manage and amend resources in
much the same way as is standard practice on a farm (Table 19.1). Foragers maintain
resources by intentional sowing of wild seeds, irrigation of stands of grasses, burn-
ing to stimulate plant growth, selective culling of game animals and fish, replanting of
portions of roots, enrichment planting of trees, and extraction of only parts of honey-
combs so sites are not deserted by bees (Steward 1938; Lawton et al. 1976; Woodburn
1980; Kelly 1995).
Many cultures and groups directly manage trees on and off the farm. The forest
islands of Amazonia were found by Posey (1985) to have emerged as a result of Kayapo
directly planting-up mounds. In the lower Amazon, smallholder farmers enrich the
forests with desirable fruit, timber, and medicinal trees, often broadcasting seeds when
cutting timber (Brookfield and Padoch 2007). In dryland Kenya, Acacia tortilis tree
recruitment occurs on the sites of abandoned pastoralist corrals that are high in organic
matter and nutrients from the penned livestock. Acacia seedpods are a favored fodder,
and some pass through the animals to then germinate in the next season. The result is
circular woodlands of dense Acacia (Reid and Ellis 1995; Berkes 1999). In China there is
widespread use of wild trees in integrated systems of land management, and wild plants
and animals are gathered from a variety of microenvironments, such as dykes, woods,
ponds, and irrigation ditches (Li 2001).
Farmers also widely transplant species from the wild. In northern Nigeria, they plant
Hibiscus on field boundaries; in South Africa, wild fruit trees and edible herbs are grown
on farms; and in northeastern Thailand, a quarter of all the 159 wild food species gathered
from field boundaries, irrigation canals, swamps, and roadsides are transplanted and prop-
agated by rice farmers (Price 1997; High and Shackleton 2000; Harris and Mohammed
2003). Home gardens are particularly important for many rural smallholders, and are