Wild Foods - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 487

Wild Foods in a Changing Climate
Forecasting the precise impacts of the changing climate on the availability of wild foods
is difficult (MEA 2005; Woodruff et al. 2006). Studying resilience and vulnerability in
two communities in Tanzania and Niger, Strauch et al. (2009) concluded that there was
insufficient evidence to predict the impacts that climate change would have on both
human foraging and the interlinked processes of local ecological knowledge transmis-
sion, cultural continuity, and land-based subsistence livelihood.
At a regional level, White et al.'s (2007) study of the effects of a changing climate on
wild food supplies in the Arctic described multiple impacts as a result of hydrological
changes. These stresses are compounded by rapid sociocultural change in the region
(Samson and Pretty 2006; Loring and Gerlach 2009). Although wild food use is poten-
tially affected by these changes, wild species might also play a critical role in buffering
against food stress caused by climate change. “The innate resilience of wild species to
rapid climate change, which is often lacking in exotic species,” means that they could
play an increasingly important role during periods of low agricultural productivity
associated with climate events (Fentahun and Hager 2009, 208).
Land Use Change and Degradation
Current trends in land use, including expansion of intensive agriculture, limit the
capacity of ecosystems to sustain food production and maintain the habitats of wild
food species (Foley et al. 2005). The commercialization of agriculture potentially
implies decreased reliance on wild foods (Treweek et al. 2006). Agricultural and land
use policy, infrastructure development, and widened access to markets all drive land use
change, and are implicated in declines of wild species in Thailand (Padoch et al. 2007;
Schmidt-Vogt 2001) and China (Xu et al. 2009).
Biodiversity in intensely managed swidden (shifting) fallows has traditionally
provided communities with the means to increase incomes, improve diets, and
increase labor productivity. Most of the wild food species utilized by swiddeners
come from fallows, rather than mature forests. With the replacement of swidden
farming by annual or perennial crops (Bruun et al. 2009), wild foods that accompa-
nied fallows are being lost, leading to decreased diversity, and with it downgraded
nutritional status, health and income, and the removal of a vital “safety net” for the
rural poor (Rerkasem et al. 2009). Somnasang et al. (1998) report that in twenty vil-
lages surveyed in Thailand, deforestation had led to a decline in wild food species.
Efforts by the local community to stem this loss by domesticating important species
were unsuccessful, since many species do not survive outside their natural forested
habitat.