Introduction
One of the major global challenges for the next decades is to increase food security while preserving natural habitats (Godfray et al., 2010; Latawiec et al., 2015). Historically, food production comes via the expansion of agriculture over pristine natural habitats (Alexanderet al., 2015), placing industrial food systems among the main drivers of land-use change (Foley et al., 2011; IPBES, 2019). More food production, however, does not guarantee access and conversion of natural habitats into agricultural fields has limited impact on food security due to access limitations (FAO, 2020). On the other hand, natural habitats can play a major role on food security for rural people as sources of plants, fisheries, wild meat and insects, for example (Baudronet al., 2019). Access to forests can alleviate poverty by allowing many kinds of traditional management practices such as slash-and-burn agriculture, extensive pastoralism and diverse types of extractivism (Jaggeret al., 2022). Understanding the relationships between food security and forests is crucial to achieve biodiversity-friendly schemes of food production such as: sustainable intensification of agricultural production (Pretty & Bharucha, 2014) and crop yield improvement (Schütz et al., 2018) that must reduce demand for new lands and therefore, halt deforestation (Lambinet al., 2018). Fighting climate change while the population grows demands conciliating food security and protection of forests (Melo et al., 2021). For this, we need a paradigm shift that places food security in all its dimensions, including not only the access to the products of agricultural fields but the access to forest goods and services.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO, 2013), there are four main dimensions of food security. First, availability , refers to the amount of food available in the system, considering, among others, food production and population size (Burchi & De Muro, 2016). Then, utilisation refers to how people cook, process and store the food available in the system, but this dimension is also related to water and sanitation issues, both affecting food utilisation and health (Ericksen, 2008; FAO, 2020). A third aspect, stability, deals with the capacity of the system to guarantee food supply in the face of several types of disturbances, such as climate, market or political instabilities (Kah, 2017; Tendall et al., 2015). Finally, access is the capacity of people to access the food produced in the system, either buying it or being capable of producing it themselves (FAO, 2013; Klassen & Murphy, 2020). The last is thought to be the main cause of food insecurity because the amount of food needed to meet current basic world population demands is actually produced (Barrett, 2010). Economic poverty precludes access to the food market while utilisation of natural resources can alleviate food insecurity of rural poor (Miller & Hajjar, 2020). Therefore, addressing food insecurity in a broad way demands understanding the nature of the relationship between extent of natural habitats and the several dimensions of food security.
Although the scientific literature highlights the tradeoff between the establishment of new crop fields and the increasing deforestation (Meyfroidt, 2018), forest can help to improve food security (Miller et al., 2020; Rasmussen et al., 2020). Agroforestry systems, for example, can contribute to improve availability, access and stability of food systems at regional scales (Rosenstock et al., 2019). In many poor regions of tropical countries, forests are used as grazing fields for extensive pastoralism practices while helping to maintain forest cover (Alencar et al., 2022; Baudron et al., 2019). Despite this important linkages between forests and food security have been recently recognised (Bahar et al., 2020), the forest-food nexus needs to be better explored (Melo et al., 2021). Important knowledge gaps on the role of natural habitats for poverty alleviation and food security still persist and limit the quantification of forests to food security. Because a diverse set of natural and socioeconomic drivers can affect food security, we need to test and re-create ways of measuring the determinants of access to food.
Human-made or “grey” infrastructure is surely required to improve food security (Devereux, 2016). For example, roads help to guarantee access to markets and water dams to irrigation schemes (de Fraiture & Wichelns, 2010; Khan et al., 2009). The same is true for the “green” infrastructure (sensuSilva and Barbosa 2017) if we consider natural habitats as complementary sources of food items. However, current development models usually replace “green” by “grey” infrastructure and threaten landscapes of crossing a tipping point that compromises the ability of natural habitats to provide the services and goods that may improve food security (Swift & Hannon, 2010). Little grey infrastructure is a signal of underdevelopment that might reduce food availability due to limited access to food markets (Khan et al., 2009). On the other hand, little remaining natural habitats may represent a lack of complementary source of food for people, thus also reducing food security (Vysochyna et al., 2020). If it is true, it is reasonable to expect that a combination of better social indicators and enough natural habitats must provide better food security. At least theoretically, this is in accordance with the concept of “optimal landscapes” that both preserves natural habitats and produce food in a landscape structure that allows the high levels of food production, ecosystem services and biodiversity conservation (Arroyo‐Rodríguezet al., 2020).
The Brazilian seasonally dry tropical forest, also known as Caatinga, constitutes an opportunity for assessing the trade-offs and synergies between food security and forests. This region is characterised by high levels of social vulnerability (Hummell et al., 2016) and low food security when compared to the other regions of Brazil (Gubertet al., 2017). Around 60% of its forest cover is preserved, though severely degraded and fragmented (Antongiovanniet al., 2018). People in this region depend largely on small-scale agriculture and extensive pastoralism that are periodically affected by seasonal droughts, thus reducing food availability (Melo, 2017). Natural resources are therefore an important asset for the 28 million people living in this dry forest and are likely to provide both goods and services that contribute to food security. The objective of this work is to understand the nature of the relationship between food security and forests at the regional scale. For this we focused on: 1) identifying the main socioeconomic indicators of food insecurity in the Caatinga through a multidimensional index of food security and; 2) understanding the spatial configuration of food insecurity and deforestation. Our results offer important evidence on the contribution of forests to food security that should be useful to regional landscape management and challenge the notion that current models of development based on land-use change can alleviate poverty and food insecurity.
Materials and Methods