Food and Nutrition from Forests

The last few decades of ‘development’ including the Millennium Development Goals and now the Sustainability Development Goals have included a strong emphasis on food security. Unfortunately, the fundamental notion of development itself, with its emphasis on economic growth, industrialisation, and commercialization (state-led or corporation-led), has meant that the basic survival of billions ofpeople has been compromised. Indeed if climate crisis predictions are to be believed, then the survival of the human species itself (and that of all other species) is imperiled. Part of this has been ‘agricultural
development’, with an emphasis on Green Revolution like strategies, leading to biological homogenization, the wiping out of entire knowledge systems, a growing chasm between the economic and the cultural, killing of soil and poisoning of water, and a deepening crisis of livelihoods for farming, fishing, pastoral and forest-dwelling communities.