Abstract
BackgroundDespite the connections between terrestrial and marine/freshwater livelihood strategies that we see in coastal regions across the world, the contribution of wild fisheries and fish farming is seldom considered in analyses of the global food system and is consequently underrepresented in major food security and nutrition policy initiatives. Understanding the degree to which farmers also consume fish, and how fishers also grow crops, would help to inform more resilient food security interventions.ResultsBy compiling a dataset for 123,730 households across 6781 sampling clusters in 12 highly food-insecure countries, we find that between 10 and 45% of the population relies on fish for a core part of their diet. In four of our sample countries, fish-reliant households are poorer than their counterparts. Five countries show the opposite result, with fish-reliant households having higher household asset wealth. We also find that in all but two countries, fish-reliant households depend on land for farming just as much as do households not reliant on fish.ConclusionsThese results highlight the need for food security interventions that combine terrestrial and marine/freshwater programming if we are going to be successful in building a more resilient food system for the world’s most vulnerable people.
Highlights
Despite the connections between terrestrial and marine/freshwater livelihood strategies that we see in coastal regions across the world, the contribution of wild fisheries and fish farming is seldom considered in analyses of the global food system and is underrepresented in major food security and nutrition policy initiatives
With the fact that the High Level Panel on Food Security [23], as part of the World Commission on Food Security, concluded that it was critical to make “fish an integral element in inter-sectoral national food security and nutrition policies” (p. 18), and the clear evidence from a suite of sites around the world that mixed-livelihood strategies were not an exception, we aimed to investigate how widespread this mixed-strategy of fishing and farming is across food-insecure regions of the world
To quantitatively examine the prevalence of mixedlivelihood dependencies in countries where large-scale food security interventions are happening, we built a database with wealth and land ownership characteristics for fish-reliant households and their counterparts based on responses from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for the Feed the Future target countries
Summary
Despite the connections between terrestrial and marine/freshwater livelihood strategies that we see in coastal regions across the world, the contribution of wild fisheries and fish farming is seldom considered in analyses of the global food system and is underrepresented in major food security and nutrition policy initiatives. Fishing-based activities contribute to the livelihoods of over a half-billion people, with a global trade worth more than $100 billion U.S a year [5]. The contribution of aquatic-source foods to food security is increasingly recognized; This underrepresentation is in striking contrast to the reality of millions of people’s livelihood strategies and diet. US Government’s global hunger and food security initiative, Feed the Future, led by USAID [4] is an innovative undertaking in 19 countries
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