Wild Foods - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 491

physical and mental health at the community level (Samson and Pretty 2006; Loring
and Gerlach 2009). In the Canadian Artic, children now obtain more than 40 percent
of their total energy from store-bought processed foods (“sweet” and “fat” foods). In
adults, however, the benefits of continuing to consume traditional wild foods are clear,
as “even a single portion of local animal or fish food resulted in increased (p < 0.05) lev-
els of energy, protein, vitamin D, vitamin E, riboflavin, vitamin B-6, iron, zinc, copper,
magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, and potassium” (Kuhnlein and Receveur 2007,
1110). Although wild foods have always played a critical role in circumpolar communi-
ties (Ford 2009a, 2009b; Ford et al. 2009; Titus et al. 2009), public health policy across
many countries tends to operate within a model of food security that discounts the tra-
ditional food practices of these communities (Power, 2008).
Securing the Future for Wild Foods
The Millenium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA 2005) lists 250 mammalian, 262 avian,
and 79 amphibian species as threatened from overexploitation for food. Mechanisms
such as CITES regulate cross-border trade in wild species, but they require international
cooperation. At national level, however, trade is generally poorly regulated and moni-
tored, and lack of sufficient data and inadequate management regimes pose challenges
to sustainable harvesting (Schippman et al. 2006).
Policy support for wild foods contributes to both nutritional security and biodiversity
conservation, and it is crucial for both. Lack of policy support has been implicated in
the continued overharvesting of African bushmeat (Scholes and Biggs 2005). By con-
trast, support for agroforestry systems has potentially ensured sustainable harvests from
indigenous tree species in areas otherwise prone to deforestation (Sileshi et al 2007).
Management of common forests has become successful with the emergence of
joint forest management and community-managed forest groups (Molnar et al.
2007). Worldwide, some 370 million hectares (m ha) of various habitats are esti-
mated to be under community conservation, including 14 million hectares managed
by 65,000 community groups in India and 900,000 hectares managed by 12,000
groups in Nepal. A recent report by an ad-hoc working group for the UN's conven-
tion on biological diversity referred to the fact that the FAO has “estimated that the
total area of planted forest has increased from 209 million ha in 1990 to 271 million in
2005, equivalent to 7 percent of the total forest area. Furthermore, “trees outside for-
ests” (e.g. open woodlands and agroforestry systems) also provide tree products and
services that support the livelihoods of more than one billion smallholders” (Koskela
et al. 2010, 2).
Such cases provide the basis for the inclusion of food security provisions within
regimes aimed at conservation. Overall, a concern for preserving the habitats
and land uses that yield wild food species could be of immense value to the effort
to “reduce poverty while increasing food supplies and maintaining functional