Future direction
Fifteen percent of the Caatinga municipalities (n = 210) had forest cover lower than 20%. Forest restoration is a legal obligation in rural properties in Caatinga when native vegetation covers less than 20% of the property area, or when the buffer areas of forest around water-resources (i.e., Areas of Permanent Preservation - APP) are degraded (Brasil, 2012). The legal obligation can be seen as an opportunity to promote co-benefits between restoration and food security by the generation of jobs and income related to forest restoration (Mesquita et al., 2010). Forest restoration should directly support food security since it can promote stability for food production through water and soil protection (Soares-Filho et al., 2014) or improve the availability of food resources through agroforestry systems (Chamberlain et al., 2020) . Variables related to protection of forests appear as one of the dimensions of our index (PC 10 in 2006 and PC 3 and 4 in 2017 - Table 2 and Supplementary Table 2 and 3) while variables related to the lack of protection contributed negatively to food security (PC 12 in 2006 and PC 9 in 2017). Thus, forest restoration in municipalities can help to increase food security mainly if productive restoration such as agroforests are implemented (Yang et al., 2020). Then, it is possible to restore many deforested areas without competing with food production and also creating opportunities to improve access and stability of food systems. The priority of restoration should be given to low-income farmers and to municipalities with high levels of poverty and deforestation, since these are the places where it should have the greatest positive impact in increasing food security and also as a matter of environmental justice (Cousins, 2021; Reij & Garrity, 2016).
On the other hand, promoting restoration in municipalities with high forest cover could lead to more trade-offs with food security than co-benefits. In this situation, policies aiming to increase food security should attack social inequality (Misselhorn et al., 2012) and take advantage of large tracts of native vegetation to maintain it under legal protection, whereas protected areas can help to improve people’s well-being and food security (Naidoo et al., 2019).
Conclusion
We highlighted that native vegetation should be taken into account when thinking about food security and sustainable food systems. Forests play an important role in maintaining the stability and productivity of the local food system (Chamberlain et al., 2020; Melo et al., 2020), but are not usually addressed in food security studies (FAO 2013; Ozturk 2015; Gubert et al. 2017; but see Vysochyna et al. 2020). Our approach shows that there are no intrinsic, unavoidable trade-offs between forest cover increase and food security. In fact, as poverty and inequality were the main source of food insecurity in Caatinga, well-designed ecological restoration programmes can help to alleviate poverty by creating jobs and promoting more income to rural families. Although restoration is an important ally to reduce poverty, this is not a solution for food insecurity in Caatinga and other drylands. There is still an urgent need for social policies that directly aim to reduce poverty in all its dimensions (UNDP & OPHI, 2020) which will greatly improve food security. Those policies should promote ways out of poverty that do not compromise the already over-pressured natural systems (see Chamberlain et al. 2020; Cousins 2021 for examples), they should be focused in the most socially vulnerable and environmentally degraded municipalities, such the ones with low forest cover and low food security or the ones that had negative synergies (lose-lose) between forest and food. Otherwise, those policies might not reduce poverty and food insecurity where it is most needed.
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