Forest products play an essential role as a food safety net and a a source of medicinal plants for millions of the world’s rural poor.

But this role is rarely estimated precisely. CIFOR has been addressing this short coming through recent studies to quantify the real contribution of forest products to the diet and health status of forest dwellers in the Malinau Research Forests in East Kalimantan.

Comparing Punan communities living in remote areas of the upper Tubu with Punan communities resettled in the vicinity of Malinau city revealed very different economic and health conditions. The former have the best possible access to forest products and depend on a subsistence economy because of their remoteness. The latter have more economic resources and poor access to forest products.

The forest dwellers have much poorer health, mainly due to the fact that they have much lower access to primary health services. They suffer particularly from skin diseases and bad teeth and child mortality can be as high as 35 deaths per 100 births. In resettlement areas close to Malinau this last figure drops to six deaths for 100 births.

To investigate this further, CIFOR’s Edmond Dounias and Audrey Selzner set off into the forest. They visited three villages to compare diets. The villages included: Long Payang, a periurban location with diversified activities but poor access to forest products; Rian Tubu, a remote village but with active swidden cultivators nearly self-sufficient in rice; and Long Pada, a remote village still dependent on hunting and gathering to complement the diet.

“Food habits are oriented by cultural choices and free will," Selzner said, "But they are also conditioned by environmental constraints and depend on local access to wild as well as domesticated resources.”

Selzner and Dounias’s painstaking research involved sitting with villagers and analysing 827 dishes of food over 108 house-days among 27 different houses composed of 43 households and 238 individuals. They even took a set of solar powered precision weighing scales.

The scales were used to measure ingredients before cooking, to weigh meals when they were ready, to weigh each consumer’s meals, and to weigh any leftovers.

The ingredients the Punan use would intrigue even the most reluctant chef. They included wild boar, deer, macaque monkey, mice, squirrels, river snails, ferns, quail grass, papaya, citronella grass, onions, rambai fruit, chillies, lemons, mushrooms, cassava roots, bean-curd and taro.

Needless to say, the location governed the proportion of the ingredients in the diet and where they came from. Those groups further from the forest obviously ate less forest products and bought more food from local stores. But that also gave them access to more variety.

“In Indonesia, people downstream ate seven different types of meat while we were there, but the Punan in the forest only ate three types,” Selzner said.

Dounias and Selzner even checked up on the use of snacks between meals.

“Snacking is extremely common among the Punan, as it is among many hunting and gathering societies. More than 30 percent of the calories among Cameroonian Pygmies come from snacks,” Dounias said. In Indonesia, people living near the city ate cakes, ice cream and soft drinks, while the forest people contented themselves with seasonal fruit.

At the end of the research, however, Selzner found that the people in each village ate almost the same proportions of protein (about 24-27 percent), starch (about 50-53 percent) and vegetables (about 22-23 percent). According to Selzner, this seems to constitute a well-balanced diet, but the people downstream have a more diversified diet.

Dounias and Selzner are still working towards a clear answer to the differences in health problems. “To get a more accurate picture further research is needed on a seasonal basis to identify chronic as well as seasonal nutrient deficiencies that may affect health. This is especially true among high-risk groups like children and pregnant women,” Dounias said. (PS)

This study was funded jointly by IRD (French Research Institute for Development) and CIFOR’s “Forests and Livelihoods” programme.