Abstract
Food and nutrition security builds resilience in a society when people have access to safe and nutritious foods. The Barents region, covering the Northern parts of Finland, Norway, and Sweden, and the North-western part of Russia, seeks common goals that include the well-being of the region’s inhabitants by ensuring preservation of local culture and social and environmental sustainability. This paper reviews existing literature on food and nutrition security in relation to building resilience and promoting well-being in the region. Amongst the local communities, traditional foods have served as a major source of healthy diet that ensures food security. Access to secure, nutritious, and healthy food is one of the aspects offering greater human security and societal stability. Traditional food has served as a major source of healthy diet, in particular, in the remote sparsely populated Barents region and amongst the local communities of the region. However, there is concern about global climate change and its effect on the region and pollution from human activities, such as the extractive industrial activities, that are detrimental to safe and secure food supply chain. In this paper, I highlight the contribution of traditional foods to food security in the Barents region. In addition, the paper emphasized that value addition to these traditional foods will help to stimulate the economy by creating new jobs. Ultimately, ensuring food and nutrition security in a sustainable way within the region will help to build resilience and promote culture and ecology with a view to offering greater human and societal security.
Highlights
The concept of food security has evolved over the decades with several definitions
Food sharing as an economic strategy has been part of the culture in the Barents region and has served to improve resilience amongst Indigenous peoples; this practice ensures there is the availability of traditional food in almost every household within the community [34]
The indicators of food and water security in an Arctic health context measured these temporal changes. These indicators can be measured for the countries of the Barents region; they promote the proportion of traditional foods in diet and the non-monetary accessibility to food when the indigenous population of this region are considered
Summary
A working definition from 2001 states that food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life [1]. This definition incorporates food safety and nutritional balance, reflecting concerns about food composition and other minor nutrient requirements for an active and healthy life.
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