Forest foods and healthy diets: quantifying the contributions

Abstract

SUMMARYForested landscapes provide a source of micronutrient rich food for millions of people around the world. A growing evidence base suggests these foods may be of great importance to the dietary quality of people living in close proximity to forests -especially in communities with poor access to markets. Despite widespread evidence of the consumption of forest foods around the world, to date, few studies have attempted to quantify the nutritional contributions these foods make. In this study we tested the hypothesis that the consumption of forest foods can make important contributions to dietary quality. We investigated the dietary contributions of wild forest foods in smallholder dominated forested landscapes from 37 sites in 24 tropical countries, using data from the Poverty and Environment Network (PEN). We compared quantities of forest foods consumed by households with dietary recommendations and national average consumption patterns. In addition, we compared the relative importance of forests and smallholder agriculture in supplying fruits, vegetables, meat and fish for household consumption. More than half of the households in our sample collected forest foods for their own consumption, though consumption patterns were skewed towards low-quantity users. For high-quantity consuming households, however, forest foods made a substantial contributions to their diets. The top quartile of forest food users in each site obtained 14.8% of the recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables, and 106% of the reference quantity of meat and fish from forests. In 13 sites, the proportion of meat and fish coming from forests was greater than from domestic livestock and aquaculture, while in 11 sites, households procured a greater proportion of fruits and vegetables from forests than from agriculture. Given high levels of heterogeneity in forest food consumption, we identify four forest food use site typologies to * Correspondence: Amy Ickowitz e-mail: A.Ickowitz@cgiar.org characterize the different use patterns: 'forest food dependent', 'limited forest food use', 'forest food supplementation' and 'specialist forest food consumer' sites. Our results suggest that while forest foods do not universally contribute significantly to diets, in some sites where large quantities of forest foods are consumed, their contribution towards dietary adequacy is substantial.

Access to common resources and food security: Evidence from National Surveys in Nigeria

“…The relationship which emerges from the analysis of other cases is that households closer to this type of asset are worse off than others because they may have lower access to social services and infrastructure in general (Wunder et al 2014a). Another dimension is that the types of food resource extracted from forest tend not to be associated with staple foods, with the exception of some roots, limiting their impact from a caloric intake point of view (Rowland et al 2016). However, other studies have shown that households with access to forest as a CR may be better off than other households sharing similar characteristics of isolation, but without access to forest as a CR (Clements et al 2014), highlighting the need for further investigation of this dimension.…”

“…As the survey is representatively based on a national census, its sampling procedure avoids the general bias associated with more specific case studies on wild resources (i.e. PENbased analyses which focus on communities related to forests, such as those of Wunder et al (2014b) and Rowland et al (2016). The sample of households was surveyed in 2012 and 2013.…”

“…land being common or otherwise), it is notable that Ickowitz et al (2014) identified a significant non-linear positive relationship between tree cover and the vegetable (and fruit) consumption of about 93,000 children in 21 African countries surveyed between 2003 and 2011. 1 Even if wild foods fail to meet the minimum recommended intake of fruit and vegetables, such contributions may be critical when agricultural production falls short of meeting global per capita needs (Siegel et al 2014in Rowland et al 2016. A similar contribution to diets for people close to forests is made by bush meat, which may account for one fifth to three fifths of the national average protein intake, sometimes meeting the minimum intake requirements of the most dependent households (Rowland et al 2016). Most of the evidence is related to forested landscapes, although non-forested (e.g.…”

“…Exceptions are the Poverty and Environment Network (PEN) dataset of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) (Wunder et al 2014a;Rowland et al 2016) and the USAID standardised Demographic and Health Surveys Johnson et al 2013). The role of the hidden harvest has been demonstrated.…”

“…Finally, the sampling procedure used in these surveys avoids the bias inherent in more specific case studies on wild resources (i.e. PEN-based analyses which focus on communities related to forests; see Wunder et al (2014b) and Rowland et al 2016).…”