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

1. Introduction

An adequate nutrient intake and a well-balanced diet are crucial aspects of proper nutrition, which is essential for a healthy lifestyle and disease prevention [1,2,3,4,5]. When diets are not sufficiently diverse, people may suffer from one or more forms of malnutrition: undernutrition, nutrition deficiencies, obesity and non-communicable diseases [6,7]. An affordable, sustainable and efficient way to ensure adequate dietary diversity and hence combat food insecurity is through the sustainable consumption of local food plants¹. More specifically, evidence indicates that traditional food systems which are rich in local plant diversity can provide healthy and balanced diets [8,9]. Many locally available plants, either gathered from the wild or cultivated, are low in carbohydrates, and high in other components important for the human diet, such as fibre, proteins, minerals (e.g. iron and zinc), and critical micro-nutrients (vitamins and provitamins) or secondary metabolites with antioxidant properties [10]. Furthermore, these plants tend to be easily accessible, affordable and well adapted to local environmental conditions or, in the case of domesticated species, to low-input farming systems [11]. Beyond being a nutrition source, many local but underutilised plants yield other useful products such as animal feed, timber, fibres or medicines, that contribute to safeguarding rituals, traditions and biocultural diversity [12,13]. Furthermore, local food plants are often used as a food supply for emergencies, alleviating communities from seasonal food scarcity or income shortages [14,15,16,17]. Nevertheless, changes in society and in dietary habits have led to increasingly associate the dependency on local plants with poverty, social marginality and food scarcity², hence stigmatising their consumption in many local communities [18,19,20,21]. Climate change, habitat loss and environmental degradation are other drivers resulting in the disappearance of local food plants from local diets [22,23,24]. Finally, local crops are increasingly replaced by major global staples as farming systems become more commercially oriented and breeding efforts fail to address minor species [25,26,27].

The present work builds upon data obtained within the global programme “Sowing Diversity=Harvesting Security” (SD=HS). The data was collected in six low- and mid-income countries (Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Guatemala, Peru and Nepal). One of the programme’s main foci is to improve the quality and diversity of the diet in the target communities, contribute to their nutrition security, and reduce the food scarcity periods by promoting intake of nutritious food. The Farmer Field School (FFS) approach forms a major instrument in realising these goals. An analysis of the data collected during the diagnostic phase, which prepared the season-long FFS activities, focussed on communities’ perceptions about food and nutrition insecurity and local food plant consumption, thus evaluating the role that local food plants may play in supporting households’ food and nutrition security, including in times of seasonal food scarcity.

2. Materials and Methods

2.1. The FFS Approach and Methodology

The activities regarding local food plants and nutrition security within the global SD=HS programme were implemented over a period of three years (2019-2021) through the establishment and operation of over 300 FFS, which reached more than 20,000 participants across six countries. The implementation of the FFSs was preceded by a diagnostic phase, aimed at obtaining a baseline description of communities’ food and nutrition insecurity, as well as their agroecosystems and their agricultural and household practices concerning local food plants. Since this early stage and throughout the implementation of the FFSs, participants were organized in small subgroups, to encourage all of them to openly express themselves and play an active role [28]. The diagnostic phase encompassed a set of participatory exercises conducted over a number of subsequent meetings, according to the methods outlined in the Facilitators’ Field Guide for Farmer Field Schools on local food plants for nutrition [29]. At the end of this process and based on the outcomes of the exercises, participants defined a list of priority research objectives and related activities, to leverage the role of local food plants in supporting the communities’ dietary quality and nutrition security. The following exercises (Table 1), which were conducted in the diagnostic phase of each FFS, provided the data analysed in the study.

2.2. Data Analysis

The present study is based on data collected during the diagnostic phase of 84 FFS conducted in 2021, and included in eight reports from Guatemala, 15 from Peru, 23 from Uganda, 19 from Zambia, 12 from Zimbabwe, and seven from Nepal. Details on the location and agroecological contexts of the analysed FFS are given in SI Table S1. The raw data from the diagnostic exercises across all countries was checked for quality and completeness. Multiple responses were reorganised into pre-defined categories to enable analysis. In the process, the original responses were maintained alongside the reorganised ones, to facilitate later interpretation of the results. The analyses were performed both on a global scale, aggregating all country results, and on a country-level basis. Frequencies and percentages (rounded to the closest integer) at which specific answers occurred were calculated for all the study variables. The scarcity seasons reported by participants were put into context by using the Köppen-Geiger climate classes [30] of the FFS locations, combined with the description of the national agroecological zones provided by country partners. Duplicate names were removed from the local plant lists, and the two features of seasonality and availability during scarcity were summarised for the plant lists of each country. Qualitative analysis was conducted for the coping strategy module, and coping strategies were categorized in four groups [31,32]. A matrix was constructed in which the frequency of the different severity levels associated with each coping strategy was reported. The most frequently mentioned severity level was taken as the consensus severity scenario associated with each strategy, while the average severity score was also calculated. All data handling and analyses was done with R statistical tools and packages [33].

3. Results

3.1. Malnutrition Problem Tree

A global overview of the factors that FFS communities cited as affecting their capacity to obtain adequate quantity or variety of food is presented in Figure 1. The most frequently identified cause of malnutrition was a poor diet (over 40% of responses). Within this category, dietary imbalances were cited in 47% of the cases, almost a third of which mentioned the lack of dietary diversity explicitly (data not shown). Several other causes identified may be regarded as more specific, in turn explaining the roots of a poor diet. Poverty, resulting in limited access to productive assets and lack of knowledge (on farming, nutrition, food composition and preparation methods) were the next most important causes mentioned. Agronomic problems (e.g., lack of seed, poor yields), environmental challenges (e.g., drought, floods) and negative attitudes towards local foods were also reported, although at lower frequencies.

Data from the single countries involved in the study indicates the prevalence of poor or imbalanced diets as the main malnutrition cause, while poverty ranks second everywhere except in Zambia and Nepal, where it is surpassed by the more specific causes of agronomic problems and lack of knowledge, respectively. The most frequently mentioned malnutrition consequences were underweight (including its most extreme manifestation, stunted growth) and illnesses (26% and 27% each). Among the latter, anaemia, rickets and reduced vision or night blindness were reported. Related consequences as lethargy and poor life expectancy followed in importance (14% each). Responses from African countries and Peru also indicated obesity and other non-communicable diseases as important issues, with the highest frequencies being registered in Peru (13%).

3.2. Changes in Local Food Plant Consumption and Community Nutrition Status over Time

In each FFS, the timeline exercise allowed analysing which major changes in agroecosystems and diets had occurred in the communities over the last thirty years: FFS participants were asked if the consumption of local food plants had increased or decreased and if the nutritional status of their community had improved or worsened. On a global scale, over 93% of the responses reported local plants to be consumed less, and 80% reported that their nutritional status had gotten worse (data not shown). A modest but significantly positive correlation was detected between the consumption of local food plants and nutritional status (cor = 0.3205022, p-value < 0.005). Breaking down the timeline data by country (Table 2), the most negative scenario in terms of local plant consumption emerged from Guatemala and Peru, where all responses reported a decrease, followed by the African countries (over 90%). In contrast, the trend in Nepal was less dramatic: while a decrease in local food plant consumption was still the prevailing response (around 60%), more than 40% of the FFS reported an increase. In terms of nutritional status, although the answers in most countries indicated that it had worsened, participants from Guatemala and Nepal also reported improvements. In Nepal, where more improvements were reported, these were attributed to increases in the use of local crop diversity. Significant positive correlations between declining consumption of local food plants and deteriorating nutritional status were obtained in Uganda and Zimbabwe. The data from the other three countries did not carry sufficient variation to allow for an analysis of the correlation between local food plant consumption and nutritional status.

When asked about what influenced their nutritional status on the one hand and the consumption of local food plants on the other, respondents listed common factors, but their relative influence was different (Figure 2): globalization and changing habits were more often cited among the causes of local food plant neglect than of nutritional deteriorations. On the contrary, poverty was much more important in influencing communities’ nutritional status than in underlying a decrease in local food plant consumption. Lack of knowledge was equally important in both contexts.

Country-level data reflected the main global patterns: both globalization and changing food habits (Zambia, Zimbabwe, Peru) and the lack of suitable seed or starting material (Uganda, Guatemala, Nepal) were the foremost factors that affected the consumption of local food plants. Poverty ranked lowest, if at all, among the factors affecting local food plant consumption in the surveyed countries. Yet, poverty was the most important cause of nutrition status changes reported from Uganda and Peru, while lack of crops/foods was reported to be the top factor in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Guatemala, and Nepal. The differences in the ranking of the common factors which influence local food plant use and nutritional status, as well as the country specificities, point to the complexity of the relationship between local plant consumption and nutrition, and remind us of the important role of many confounding factors such as local cultures, climates and socio-economic conditions.

3.3. The Role of Local Food Plants During Food Scarcity Periods

In the diagnostic phase, FFS participants were asked questions about food scarcity periods, including their prevalence by calendar month and in relation to the cropping season. The scarcity periods by calendar month reported for each country by more than 50% of the responses were considered here to be the peak of the scarcity period (months which were mentioned in fewer responses were excluded) and are shown in Figure 3, next to the main harvest months.

In Africa, the longest scarcity period was reported by FFS participants in Zimbabwe, where most responses reported food scarcity over a period of four months between October and January. Zambian FFS reported a partially overlapping, yet slightly shorter, scarcity period (three months between December and February). The great majority of the FFS in these two countries were located in hot arid steppe or temperate climates, with erratic rainfall distribution, frequent seasonal droughts and severe mid-season dry spells [34,35]. The scarcity months most frequently reported by FFS participants in these countries coincide with the tail end of the rainy season, immediately before the green harvests of February-March which are followed by the main harvest from April to June-July. The Ugandan scarcity period was reported to last three months between April and June, with a peak in May. This period, too, falls within the rainy season of the tropical savanna climates of Ugandan FFSs [36] and, again, corresponds to the time before the harvests which are mostly concentrated between June and August. The Guatemalan FFS are located in humid montane forest areas with subtropical climates and altitudes ranging from 1400 to 2400 masl [37]. The time and duration of the cropping season varies with altitude and among villages and depends on the growth cycle of the main staple, maize: some varieties mature in three months, while others take up to nine months to be ready to harvest. The most frequently reported scarcity months by Guatemalan FFS participants were August and September, towards the end of the rainy season, and just before the main harvest at the end of the year [38]. In Peru, all FFS were located in the Andean highlands, in either the Quechua (2300 - 3500 masl) or the Suni (3500 - 4000 masl) agroecological regions, and are characterised by either subtropical highland or tundra-like climates [39]. The main scarcity period was reported to occur in the early months of the year (January and February), once again overlapping with the second half of the rainy season and the months preceding the March-June harvest period [40]. In Nepal, three months (June to August) which fall within the monsoon growing season and precede the harvests were reported as food scarce, but also the dry winter months of January and February were mentioned with similar frequencies [41]. Both periods are traditionally known as agricultural lean seasons, leading to increased risks of food insecurity [42].

In conclusion, and as to be expected, in all countries the main reported scarcity periods occurred during the rainy (cropping) season and just before fresh crop harvests, when stocks of staple grains from the previous year have likely been depleted.

3.4. Food Scarcity Coping Strategies

The coping strategies adopted by communities during the scarcity period, their frequency and its relation with their severity, are presented in Table 3.

The two most frequently adopted strategy types which emerged from the global analysis were food seeking and financial coping strategies, with the former significantly surpassing the latter. When grouped by type, the frequency of applied coping strategies and the severity of the food scarcity situation were inversely correlated (cor = -0.9844758, p-value < 0.05), with the more frequent strategy types being associated with the less severe food scarcity periods, and the less practised coping strategies linked to the most severe scarcity conditions. Whereas these results show a certain correlation, no absolute divisions of coping strategies and their severity over the scarcity periods are implied. In fact, farming communities in Uganda and Zimbabwe adopted all types of coping strategies over the entire food scarcity period, whereas farmers in Peru and Nepal adopted food seeking strategies only. In those countries where a greater number of coping strategy types was used, the average severity in food scarcity experienced by FFS participants (Figure 4) tended to be higher. Indeed, a positive correlation was found between the number of coping strategy types adopted and the average severity reported (cor = 0.8773828, p-value < 0.05).

Food seeking strategies were most prevalent in all but one of the study countries, the exception being Zambia, where this strategy group was surpassed in frequency by strategies based on financial adjustments. ‘Food rationing’ was mentioned in Guatemala (39%) and Uganda (20%), and to a limited extent in Zambia (6%) but not in the other countries. Changes to household management and relations were a set of coping strategies only applied in Uganda and Zimbabwe, where the reported level of food scarcity was relatively heavy, and all coping strategies were applied.

Within the food seeking strategies, the consumption of local and wild plants was mentioned by FFS in all countries, except Peru. It was also the most frequent food seeking strategy in three out of the five countries that mentioned it (Uganda, Zambia and Guatemala) and the second most frequent in the other two (Zimbabwe and Nepal). Analysing the local food plant lists, the proportion of plants reported to be available during the scarcity period (either directly and/or through preservation) correlated both with the length of the scarcity period (cor = 0.899, p-value < 0.05) as well as with the average severity of the scarcity period (cor = 0.972, p-value < 0.05). The latter relationship suggests that as the severity of food scarcity, hence the distress communities are facing, increases, the perceived importance of scarcity-relevant local food plants also increases.

3.5. Priority Activities for Leveraging the Role of Local Food Plants

In reflecting on the results of preceding exercises, FFS participants selected several priority activities to address their food and nutrition security problems using local food plants (Table 4). The activities prioritised by farmers were categorised as either “field-based” or “food-based”. The former group concerned a diverse set of activities, some with a general focus (such as cultivating more local crops) and some with a specific reference to a given species (such as overcoming germination or seed dormancy limitations). Within the field group, activities relevant to domesticated species were more frequently mentioned than those referring exclusively to wild food plants, reflecting the prominence of cultivated species in the communities’ plant lists. Within the food-based group, the most frequently mentioned activity (and the most preferred overall) was the organization of food preparation and cooking demonstrations, which were deemed useful to improve taste and texture or lessen laborious processing of specific local food plants. The importance of storage/preservation was mentioned both at field and food levels, suggesting the importance of ensuring the availability of sufficient stocks of either planting material or food, or both. Seed and food fairs constituted an integrated, farm-to-fork approach to leveraging the role of local food plants in both agronomic and dietary aspects.

4. Discussion

This study aimed to improve our understanding of the role of local food plants in enhancing communities’ food and nutrition security. Our data is based on the perceptions of FFS participants rather than on systematic measurements of food and nutrition security, dietary diversity and local plant use. Although the FFS methodology was designed to generate a clear and comprehensive picture of reality, in interpreting our results we must keep in mind the qualitative and subjective nature of participants’ answers, as well as the non-independence of and causal relations between some of the factors they consider to be responsible for the observed trends. This limits to some extent the interpretation of our findings. Nevertheless, many of the results we obtained are matched and corroborated by information gathered through other data collection methods in other studies. Furthermore, perceptions influence people’s behaviours and choices, shape their reality and determine how they decide to act upon and create change. Therefore, we believe that farmers’ perceptions and views can give foremost insights into the factors that are most important to farmers themselves and hence contribute to defining local problems and developing adaptive and relevant solutions. With the above in mind, we discuss the most important findings emerging from our global analysis in the light of existing literature on nutrition and local food plants.

In setting the baseline of their nutritional status with the help of the malnutrition problem tree exercise, respondents attributed considerable importance to imbalanced and low-diversity diets in determining the level and nature of malnutrition they experience. Their perception is reflected in a large body of literature that links malnutrition to dietary diversity, more than to energy deficiencies [43,44,45,46,47,48]. The dangers and consequences mentioned by farmers in this study also correspond to those known to derive from increasingly monotonous diets, such as undernutrition, illnesses, poor productivity and, increasingly, obesity [49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56].

Delving deeper into the role of local agrobiodiversity, one of the most important responses from FFS participants concerned the reported coincidence between the decline in local food plant consumption and the deterioration in communities’ nutritional status. This result is in line with literature that reports on the linkages between local agrobiodiversity (wild or cultivated) and nutrition: a number of studies have investigated such linkages through a systematic analysis based on accurate sampling populations, collection of anthropometric measurements, calculation of dietary diversity scores, administration of recall surveys or a combination of these methods [57,58,59,60,61,62,63,64]. Other authors have gone further, showing that the potential of a farm to deliver a wide range of nutrition functions to its owners increases with increasing on-farm agrobiodiversity [65]. Poverty was considered by farmers as an important underlying cause of deteriorations in their nutritional status (both in the malnutrition problem tree and in the nutrition timeline). Indeed, the vital relationship which exists between nutritional status, human capital, and economic standing is well described: malnutrition adversely affects the physiological and mental capacity of individuals, which in turn hampers productivity levels and health (as explicitly mentioned by FFS participants), making them and their respective communities more susceptible to poverty and thus creating a vicious cycle [66]. Financial constraints also lead to the consumption of cheap, high-energy rather than nutritionally dense food; in this sense poverty relates to the previously discussed dietary imbalances, supporting the inextricable relation between the different factors which underlie such a multifactorial phenomenon as malnutrition.

While poverty was the top factor causing malnutrition, it was not perceived as being so impactful on the decline in local food plant consumption; this may suggest that even when income levels are very low, and healthy foods cannot be afforded on the market, households still have the possibility to turn to local or traditional crops and foods, thus ensuring the intake of important micronutrients [31,67,68,69,70,71,72]. Rather than poverty, it was changing habits and lifestyles (use of junk food, negative attitudes towards local foods and recipes, greater engagement in off-farm work) which were perceived as the major determinants of declining local food plant consumption. The ongoing dietary transition affecting high-, mid- and low-income countries [8,25,73,74,75,76] is indeed well described, being ever more accelerated by massive marketing and advocacy, social media influences and greater availability of cheap fats in the global economy [77]. Sustained consumption of local food plants also appeared to be affected by seed system disruptions, which prevent farmers from accessing appropriate planting material hence limiting the diversity they can grow and consume [78]. It is worth recalling that the development and availability of planting material from minor, underutilised species, depends almost entirely on on-farm conservation and on healthy and dynamic local seed systems [79,80]; however, these tend to be highly vulnerable to acute stresses (conflicts, disasters) or chronic problems relating to social inequalities, inefficiencies, lack of coordination, or inappropriate regulatory frameworks [81]. The lack of seed, of course, progressively causes abandonment of traditional food plant cultivation, which in turn may lead to genetic erosion [82] and loss of knowledge on the associated management practices [73,83,84,85,86]. The interaction between social (poverty, globalization) and seed and farming system changes is reflected in the activities farmers prioritised at the end of the FFS diagnostic phase, to revitalise local food plant use. Cooking demonstrations, the top preferred activity among farmers, have been successfully used elsewhere, to spark a renewed interest in local food plant consumption and overcome the stigmatisation of traditional foods [87,88]. At the same time, activities aiming at reintroducing local species into cultivation require efforts to support a consistent supply of quality seeds, addressing some species’ genetic or physiological shortcomings, promoting best agronomic practices and improving post-harvest infrastructure [71,89,90,91].

Despite a declining trend in the use of local food plants, responses on their food scarcity coping strategies highlighted that communities still heavily rely on them during food scarcity periods, a phenomenon that has been observed earlier [92,93,94,95,96]. Across our target countries, the correspondence between the late stages of the main cropping season and the reported food scarcity period confirms the well-known fact that food shortages mostly occur when food stocks from the previous growing season have been depleted and the products of the new harvest are not yet available (crops are still standing), a time in which food prices also tend to be high and compensating employment opportunities scarce [95,96,97,98]. The increasing proportion of scarcity-relevant plants which farmers report as their experience of scarcity and severity increases, further supports the role that local food plants can play in harsh times [99,100,101,102]. In Africa, for example, traditional vegetables like Amaranthus or Solanum spp. come into production within a short time soon after the onset of rains and can be harvested in three to four weeks later, still allowing to plant later crops such as beans that can be harvested some weeks after [103].

The capacity of local food plants to satisfy communities' needs in times of food scarcity varied according to the severity of the scarcity that farmers experienced, again a pattern which has been observed in other studies [31,32,104,105]. At lower levels of food scarcity, food seeking strategies were prevalent; within these, increased consumption of local food plants was a frequently mentioned coping strategy, and one which continued to be applied at moderate food scarcity levels. Only at higher levels of distress, communities diversified their coping strategies: collective forms of support helped villagers to access regular food crops through friends and neighbours [8,106,107], and ultimately communities were forced to shift from food seeking towards food rationing and household re-structuring approaches [32,104]. Interestingly, as the number of coping strategies increased with the severity of experienced food scarcity, the share of scarcity-relevant local food plants over the total plants mentioned in the lists increased as well. These resources seem to play an accompanying and perhaps increasing role, even as farmers turn to higher-impact coping strategies.

Our data provide valuable insights into smallholder farmers’ perceptions and decision-making regarding the role of local food plants in achieving dietary diversity and maintaining food security in times of scarcity. Further leveraging the role of these resources through integrated actions such as those prioritised within the FFS, both at farm/field level and in people’s diets, can be a powerful, yet affordable approach to conserving valuable agricultural biodiversity while protecting local livelihoods and food security [27]. Rather than adding new (or exotic) crops to farmers’ portfolio, national programmes should work towards increasing the potential of crops that farmers are already cultivating [108], especially those which are nutrient-dense and locally adapted [109]. Awareness-raising and capacity-building activities tailored to different target groups, from men and women farmers to school children [110,111,112,113] can offer important cross-cutting measures to deliver appropriate messages about the importance of diversified agroecosystems, rich in local species, in support of healthy diets and lifestyles. Scaling up such efforts from local, FFS-based dimensions and integrating them within multi-faceted approaches to agricultural and dietary diversification, will require more systematic scientific evidence on the value of individual underutilised crops and wild edibles. This evidence should be made available to decision-makers, so that more enabling policies and market environments for their development and increased production, marketing and consumption can be promoted [114,115,116].