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February 27th, 2017

Integrating fisheries and agricultural programs for food security

Published by Agriculture & Food Security Journal,

This article (PDF) in the Agriculture & Food Security Journal aims to investigate how widespread the mixed-strategy of fishing and farming is across food-insecure regions of the world. Understanding the degree to which farmers also consume fish, and how fishers also grow crops, would help to inform more resilient food security interventions. Despite the connections between terrestrial and marine/freshwater livelihood strategies seen 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. Results show that households utilize mixed-livelihood welfare strategies. These strategies are one of the approaches that marginalized households employ to buffer against social and environmental changes they cannot control. Many locally based NGOs and field programs in coastal and riverine areas witness this dynamic throughout their daily programming. However, this deeper understanding of mixed-livelihood strategies is often lost. Hence, large programs focused on food security typically follow sectoral approaches that treat the land and sea as distinct. These results highlight the need for food security interventions that combine terrestrial and marine/freshwater programming to be successful in building a more resilient food system for the world’s most vulnerable people.

Curated from agricultureandfoodsecurity.biomedcentral.com