Amazonian Food Insecurity

Small cargo boats have shallow hulls and removable outboard engines. They carry food and other goods to road-less cities in upper stretches of large rivers where conventional boats risk running aground.

Funded by the ESRC

Together with colleagues from the Lancaster Environment Centre (LEC), we are working on a project to model the impacts of droughts and flooding on vulnerability to food insecurity for city-dwellers living in the heart of the Amazon region. We are investigating how food price variability interacts with poverty and livelihood strategies to determine food security, including perceptions of access and levels of consumption.

A £300,000 ESRC fellowship awarded to Luke Parry of the LEC is funding development of statistical models of food distribution (including journey time and costs) along the Amazon river system. By combining geographical data on food distribution networks with real-time hydrological data and proxies of adaptive capacity in cities we aim to produce an early-warning system for urban vulnerability to food insecurity.