Abstract
Nigerians depend on fish for maintaining diverse and healthy diets. Fish are a key source of protein and micronutrients, both of which are important for healthy diets. Some research has shown that forests provide important ecosystem functions that support the productive capacity and sustainability of inland fisheries. Our study aims to empirically assess the relationship between forest cover around rivers and fish consumption. We use data from the Living Standards Measurement Survey (LSMS) and spatially merge household and village data with forest cover and river maps. We estimate the relationship between forest cover around rivers and average village fresh fish consumption, while also accounting for other socio-economic and geographical determinants. We find that that the density of forest cover around rivers is positively and significantly correlated with village consumption of fresh fish. Our results suggest that forests influence the consumption of fresh fish by improving the productivity of inland fisheries and increasing the availability of fish. Aquatic habitats tend to be overlooked in debates on land use and food production, and yet can be critically important sources of nutrient-rich foods that are limited in rural diets in developing countries, particularly for the poor. Clearing forests for agriculture in order to produce more agricultural crops might have the unintended consequence of reducing another important food source.
Highlights
Increasing agricultural land at the expense of forests has often been viewed as a necessary means to feed a hungry planet [1, 2]
Forest cover around rivers is around 13% across the whole sample and 21% in the warm humid and warm sub-humid zones; both remain fairly uniform across all of the different bands used in the analysis
This is because there are many villages with zero forest cover effectively flattening the overall average differences across the measures
Summary
Increasing agricultural land at the expense of forests has often been viewed as a necessary means to feed a hungry planet [1, 2]. While this is often lamented because of the impacts on biodiversity conservation and climate change [3,4,5], recent research has shown that deforestation may have negative consequences on the diets of local communities that are part of the landscape where these land use changes occur [6]. One key pathway is through the ecological functions that forests provide to wild fisheries given that fish can be a very important animal source food, for poor communities in the tropics.
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