The Role That Local Food Plants Can Play in Improving Nutrition Security and Reducing Seasonal Scarcity in Rural Communities: A Multi-Country Study

Local food plants contribute to dietary diversity, and hence, to food and nutrition security in rural households of low- and middle-income countries. However, their consumption and use are declining, in favour of simplified diets or industrial foods. This paper presents data from the Sowing Diversity = Harvesting Security programme, which aimed at improving nutrition through better use of local, underused agrobiodiversity in six low- or mid-income countries. Through a Farmer Field School approach, rural communities’ perceptions on nutrition, local food plant use, and food scarcity coping strategies were gathered. Overall, the results showed that farmers recognise the relationship which exists between increasingly impoverished diets and the (declining) use of local food plants. They attributed such a decline to multiple, intertwined factors, being both socioeconomic and cultural, as well as agronomic or environmental. Despite a declining trend, communities still heavily rely on local food plants during food scarcity periods: indeed, turning to local and wild plants emerged as one of the most frequent coping strategies in all countries, and this trend was stronger as the length and severity of the scarcity period increased. In this paper, we discuss the opportunity to further leverage the role of local food plants through integrated (“field to plate”) actions as a way to conserve valuable agricultural biodiversity while enhancing local food and nutrition security.