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Food Security, Biodiversity and Human Health: Ethnobiologyas a Predictive ScienceAuthor(s): Gary Paul Nabhan  Source: Journal of Ethnobiology, 34(1):7-11. 2014.Published By: Society of EthnobiologyDOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.2993/0278-0771-34.1.7URL: http://www.bioone.org/doi/full/10.2993/0278-0771-34.1.7

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FOOD SECURITY, BIODIVERSITY AND HUMAN HEALTH:ETHNOBIOLOGY AS A PREDICTIVE SCIENCE

Gary Paul Nabhan1

Ever since Mark Nathan Cohen’s (1976) treatise, The Food Crisis in Prehistory,ethnobiological explorations of historic shifts in subsistence strategies, agro-economic structures and uses of biodiversity have explicitly dealt with the issueof cultural responses to food insecurity and declining nutrition health. Morerecently, sensationalistic and rather simplistic treatments of these topics by thelikes of Jared Diamond (2005) have attempted to predict or ultimately avertfuture collapses in society’s capacity to sustain food security, with dubiousresults. However, archaeologists and ethnobiologists have diligently workedtogether to arrive at more nuanced understandings of how climatic, ecological,social, economic and political factors have interacted during prehistoric andhistoric periods of food crises (McAnany and Yoffee 2009, 2010).

Nevertheless, the general sorts of questions posed by Diamond remain beforeus: Can the lessons learned from the historical sciences of archaeology,paleonutrition and ethnobiology be used to forge a more comprehensive anduseful predictive science regarding trends and options for human health andfood security? Can such predictions help assure the functioning of ecosystemservices required for stable food production, while averting famine andimproving nutritional health in the face of accelerating climate change, decliningfossil fuel and fossil groundwater reserves, and burgeoning human populations?

A thoughtful summary of interdisciplinary literature on the links betweenbiodiversity and food security by T. C. H. Sunderland (2011) suggests that suchan integrative and predictive science is not only possible but increasinglynecessary. Drawing on an extensive review of ethnobiological literature, Sunder-land concludes that:

Although long considered mutually exclusive, biodiversity conservationand food security are two sides of the same coin… Maintaining diversitywithin agricultural systems is not a novel approach, but one practicedby many smallholder farmers globally, in many different ways. Thenutritional and livelihood benefits of diverse production systems are oneway of achieving food security. Such systems are also more resilient toclimate induced events or other shocks…Managing landscapes on amulti-functional basis that combines food production, biodiversityconservation and the maintenance of ecosystem services should be atthe forefront of efforts to achieve food security (Sunderland 2011:265)

1. Southwest Center, University of Arizona, Tucson AZ 85721 (gpnabhan@email.arizona.edu)

Journal of Ethnobiology 34(1): 7–11 2014

While there is intuitive sense to Sunderland’s take-home message of morestrongly linking the maintenance of biodiversity and ecosystem services inagricultural landscapes to our quest for greater food security, it will take testingsuch principles at different scales and different cultural and political-ecologicalcontexts to determine their operability for the future. In other words, ethnobiol-ogists may need to play key roles in determining whether greater biodiversitycorrelates with greater yield stability and food security only at the scale of field,farm, and ranch, or at other scales (community, foodshed, ecoregion, nation, andplanet) as well. This is but one of many ways that ethnobiologists can determinewhether our insights from empirical studies of prehistoric, historic, andcontemporary food systems have predictive value in redesigning food systemsfor a more secure and resilient future in the face of climate change.

If there is a strong correlation between biodiversity and food security atmultiple scales, then the continuing loss of biodiversity should be of concern notmerely to conservation biologists, but to nutritionists and health planners as well.The latest (2010) assessments by the Royal Botanical Garden staff at Kew suggeststhat one fifth of the world’s plant species are currently under threat of extinction,and many of the food species under threat have nutrient densities and chemo-protective secondary compounds that, if still accessible to the poor, couldimprove or sustain their health. Since 1970, when the Southern Corn Blightrevealed the relatively high genetic vulnerability of most commodity cropsgrown in the United States and Canada, considerable ink has been spilled aboutthe decline in biological diversity in North America’s commodity food system.As the diversity of nutrients and chemo-protective compounds has declined inthe American diets, we have also witnessed a dramatic increase in nutrition-related diseases such as non-insulin dependent diabetes (NIDD).

For example, the number of Americans living with this form of diabetes hasgrown to an estimated 22.3 million—about seven percent of the US population.That marks an increase of nearly five million or 22 percent from 2007 to 2012 and,according to the American Diabetes Association, translates to 245 billion dollarsof annual medical costs (Nabhan 2013a:x-xi). By 2030, we can anticipate that if thecomposition of American diets remains essentially the same as it is today, at least9 million additional Americans will suffer from diabetes, and the cost of theirtreatment may be anticipated to surpass 1.2 trillion dollars a year (Nabhan2013a). If our dietary diversity diminishes further due to crop failures associatedwith catastrophic climatic events, and loss of optimal conditions for crop andlivestock production in the areas where they are currently grown, we mightpredict even higher levels in the incidence and prevalence of NIDDM and othernutrition-related diseases.

To test whether such predictions and the hypotheses within them are valid,ethnobiologists may wish to focus more attention on the nutritional health ofhouseholds and populations in localities where food biodiversity has remainedhigh or recently been restored. Curiously, over the same approximately threedecades that commodity agriculture has lost diversity, the species richness andlandrace diversity in small-scale agriculture in the U.S. and Canada has actuallyincreased fourfold (Figure 1). This increase has likely occurred as a result ofgardeners, farmers and other small shareholders wishing to provide healthy,

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locally-produced options to commoditized foodstuffs in the globalized foodsystem. From less than 5000 unique offerings of farmer-selected, heirloom andlandrace food plant varieties voluntarily offered by members of the non-profit SeedSavers Exchange in the early 1980s, between 20,000 and 22,000 unique offeringshave been annually listed in SSE publications since 2006 (Nabhan 2013b). Today,some 640 domesticated species of crops and livestock now produced on Americanfarms and ranches are making it onto the tables of home and restaurant kitchens, andmany of them are back in the diets of North Americans for the first time in over half acentury. In addition, U.S. scientists and other citizens have recently rediscovered thatthey have nearly 4600 species of wild crop relatives still growing in North Americanlandscapes, many of which are listed as forageable staples or ‘‘famine foods’’ inDaniel Moerman’s (1998) Native American Ethnobotany compendium.

If we could confirm that accessing such diverse food resources does indeedmake a difference in the nutritional health of those who utilize them, then howwould we reallocate financial resources in our food economy and health caresystem to use food diversity to prevent nutrition-related diseases? For example,what if just one hundredth of what is expected to be invested in diabetestreatment (e.g., $245 billion in the U.S. in 2012) were annually invested in ahealthy food system offering culturally appropriate foods to America’s diversecultures? If strategically invested. How much good could $2.5 billion a year do tofurther rediversify America’s food system at all scales in order to assure improvedhuman health and increased food security in the face of climate change?

Nevertheless, if one only looks at species or varietal richness as a surrogatefor the larger concept of biodiversity in the service of food security, one could

Figure 1. Yearly growth in the number of unique heirloom vegetable, grain, herb and fruit varieties,landraces, and genotypes voluntarily offered for public access by members of the SeedSavers Exchange.

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reasonably claim that (a) the American food system is now diverse enough thatwe need not worry about food insecurity, or (b) that our present levels of speciesand varietal richness have little or nothing to do with protecting us from foodinsecurity and famine. The missing factor, of course—if you know how ecologistsconceive of and measure biodiversity—is the relative abundance of each speciesand variety relative to the entire community. In this case, most of those 22,000food plant varieties are now grown by gardeners and small farmers who manageonly a small portion of America’s arable lands and provide only two to fivepercent of the foods that U.S. and Canadian citizens consume. In other words,while the biodiversity is thankfully ‘‘present’’ in small pockets of our foodsystem, it has not yet changed the way most Americans eat, nor does it yet offermost Americans resilience or protection from the kinds of ‘‘climate inducedevents or other shocks’’ that concern Sunderland.

Perhaps the key insight embedded in the quotation from Sunderland isthat diverse production systems are but one way of achieving food security (italicsadded). No matter how many species or varieties of adapted and resilient cropsand livestock are grown in a landscape, the production system is unlikely to beresilient if its agricultural inputs, labor forces, food processing infrastructures, anddistribution and marketing subsystems are all controlled by a few largeshareholders or absentee-owned corporations. Today, we may need structuraldiversity in agricultural production, processing, distribution, retailing andinvestment, not just in the crop assemblage of a dooryard garden or food forestat a desert oasis. This is but one more example of how ethnobiology and culturalecology must be wedded with political ecology if these sciences are to help uspredict how we can better design our food systems, not only to be resilient in theface of climate change and other ‘‘shocks,’’ but to be ‘‘good, clean and fair’’ as well.

As many of my colleagues’ fine work on food security demonstrates, achievingfood security cannot be done merely with some technical fix (even if that fix isdefined as simply increasing food biodiversity); it will require protracted attentionto ethical, socioeconomic and cross-cultural concerns as well. If true food securityentails ‘‘affordable access to nutritious, culturally appropriate foods’’ that do notfurther impoverish the soil community, the farmworker community, or the food-service workers community, all of whom bring us ‘‘our daily bread,’’ then ouremerging predictive science of food security must embrace all the sciences as wellas the humanities if it is to be of any lasting value. In short, achieving food securitywill ultimately be more about enhancing our ‘‘caring capacity’’ than simply aboutramping up our landscape’s ‘‘carrying capacity.’’

References Cited

Cohen, M. N. 1976. The Food Crisis in Prehistory.

Yale University Press, New Haven.

Diamond, J. 2005. Collapse: How Societies Choose or

Fail to Succeed. Viking Penguin, New York.

McAnany, P. A., and N. Yoffee. 2009. Question-

ing Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological

Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire.

Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

UK.

McAnany, P. A., and N. Yoffee. 2010. Question-

ing how different societies respond to crises.

Nature 464:977.

Moerman, D. E. 1998. Native American Ethnobot-

any. Timber Press, Portland OR.

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Nabhan, G. P. 2013a. Food, Genes, and Culture:

Eating Right for Your Origins. Island Press,Washington, D.C.

Nabhan, G. P. 2013b. Conservation You Can Taste:

Best Practices in Heritage Food Recovery and

Successes in Restoring Agricultural Biodiversity

over the Last Quarter Century. University ofArizona Southwest Center and Slow FoodUSA, Tucson AZ.

Sunderland, T. C. H. 2011. Food Security: Why isBiodiversity Important? International Forest-

ry Review 13:265–274.

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