Not only fires ... residents of the Amazon jungle are at risk of starvation

Asia Dia

A recent study published in the journal People and Nature on April 26 revealed that residents of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil are at risk of starvation, even though they are the most diverse land in the world on food sources.

Tribes around the river
The "Riberinhos" tribe - a Portuguese word meaning the banks of rivers - lives in small groups scattered along the sides of the Amazon, so their food is mainly dependent on fishing.

The Porus River is one of the rivers most affected by the monsoon floods. When its level rises, its lands are immersed in huge forests, the fish are dispersed, and the tribe members lose their ability to hunt.

The tribe is embittered by the bitterness of marginalization by Brazilian politicians and society. Its members live in extreme poverty, and their lives are almost devoid of images of modernity and technology, as they do not have refrigerators and suffer from the electricity shortage crisis.

Above, policymakers and scientists assumed that forests that are located in the tropics have enough food to meet the needs of their inhabitants, but, on the contrary, most of their inhabitants, especially pregnant women and children, suffer from malnutrition.

Food security destabilized
For the first time, the research team - which includes researchers from Britain and Brazil - compared the food security of the Amazonian forest population to the fishing rates, that is, the amount of fish they could catch per hour. The researchers interviewed 22 groups, separated by 13 km over a length of 1267 km. 

"The study highlights areas rich in food diversity, and its marginalized people struggle to obtain food when floods destabilize their food security," says Daniel Trajido, lead researcher and professor at Lancaster University in Britain and the Federal University of Lavras in Brazil.

In the flood season, tribesmen spend three times longer fishing, and despite their strenuous efforts to provide for their food, the amount of fish they receive decreases by 73%.

This, of course, may lead them to give up one of the three meals or get a small amount of food that may not meet their daily caloric needs. In the worst conditions, they may live with empty stomachs for several days, and this may have severe health consequences that will last a lifetime.

Dams, fires and hunger
Tragedy added that "contrary to the prevailing belief, there is a contradiction between the nutritional diversity of the Amazon jungle, the small population and the food insecurity in it, and this study may make us consider for other forest dwellers."

"The Amazon basin is currently witnessing a boom in building dams on rivers to produce hydroelectric energy, but on the other hand, these dams will affect fish stocks, and the tribe may resort to overfishing wild animals to meet their food needs," says researcher at the Brazilian University of Lavras, Paulo Pompeo.

The researchers believe that organizing the fishing process during the floods is imperative to ensure the availability of food for the people of remote areas, and stressed the importance of providing school meals for children in the event of shrinking their share of fish, and concluded that the food security crisis will not be solved only by fighting poverty.

It is worth noting that the Amazon forests provide one-fifth of our planet's need for oxygen gas, so it is called "the lung of the earth", and it is characterized by biological diversity, as it alone contains 10% of the animals and plants known to the planet, and scientists considered them one of the most important factors that help to curb a crisis Global Warming.

The year 2019 witnessed the outbreak of more than 80,000 fires, in a major event that we did not witness a decade ago, which had a great impact on the international community, and forced its leaders to move towards protecting the Amazon jungle and its inhabitants.