 Good morning, everyone, and welcome to another Science at 10. They've been very successful, I gather so far, and this is the last in the series I gather for a few weeks. Our guest today, guest speaker today, is Amy Ikowitz. Amy's been leading the charge on our research related to nutrition and tree cover relationships, and we had a paper published earlier this year looking at a very large data set, looking at the relationship between child nutrition and tree cover in Africa, and Amy has developed that research a little bit further to look at the situation in Indonesia. The paper that has now been drafted shows some very, very surprising findings and some contentious findings, and I think that it will be worthy of some discussion after she's spoken, so I'm going to hand over to Amy with no further ado, and the floor is yours. Thank you very much. Thank you, everybody, for coming this morning. As Teri said, I'm going to be speaking about the relationship between nutrition and tree cover in forests in Indonesia. First, I would like to say that the paper that I'm going to be talking about is joint work with Dominic Rowland, Bronwyn Paolo, Agus, and Teri. So he sort of should have recused himself, I would say, but anyway. So first, a bit of background about the situation of nutrition in Indonesia. So Indonesia has made huge strides in the last couple of decades in reducing poverty, and in the beginning of the 1990s, it also made pretty good steps in reducing child nutrition, but since about 2000, the situation has sort of stagnated. So malnutrition rates are relatively high in Indonesia, with respect, if you compare it to other countries with similar income levels. And about one-third of children in Indonesia are stunted, which means that they are not the height that they should be for their ages. And estimates vary about how much food insecurity in terms of calorie intake there is in Indonesia, but I've seen rates from about 16% to about 36% of households in Indonesia that don't get enough food to eat. And so that's normally what people think of when they think of under nutrition or malnutrition, but there's another form of malnutrition that is actually more widespread, and that's not so much about the calories that people eat, but the quality of their diets. So the main indicator of that is our micronutrient deficiencies. So the numbers for micronutrient deficiencies amongst children, not just the data that I have here, not just for children, but for the whole population, estimates go all the way up to 100 million Indonesians that suffer from some form of micronutrient deficiencies. So the most common of those are iron, vitamin A, and zinc. And so micronutrient deficiencies, particularly in children, have very negative effects. So they increase people's susceptibility to disease because it lowers people's immunities and it retards cognitive development of children both in utero and then after they're born. And eventually in its most severe forms can actually lead to death. So the picture in Indonesia both with respect to calorie deficiency and micronutrient deficiency is not very pretty right now. There are government programs that are trying to address this, but as I said before, with respect to its income level, it's not doing too great. So that's the nutrition picture. Then on the other hand, we work for C4, so this talk has to do with forests and trees. So the forest picture, as all of you know, in Indonesia deforestation rates are relatively high. And depending on who you listen to, some of the justification in some sense for deforestation rates, high deforestation rates, especially amongst policymakers, is that even though it's kind of a bad thing, in some sense it's to serve a higher purpose is food security. So we hear lots of polemics that there's food security in order to feed the increasing global population or in the particular country that you're looking to. We have no choice in order to feed people we need agricultural land and a lot of that's going to have to come at the expense of forests. So in our work, as Terry mentioned a bit earlier, we've looked at the relationship between tree cover and nutrition in large data set in Africa and we found actually that it seems if you're thinking about food security very broadly in terms of not just the calories that people eat but the quality of their diets, we found actually positive relationships to cover and various indicators of dietary quality. So we were interested in looking in the context of Indonesia if we would find similar relationships. So our basic question is to see if there's a relationship between forests and trees in Indonesia and micronutrient rich food consumption. So we're not looking at the number of calories people consume but the quality of their diets. So there's various reasons to hypothesize why there might be a positive relationship and so it could be because forests provide ecosystem services for agriculture and that makes agriculture more productive so people have access to more food. So that's one possibility. Another possibility is that people actually directly collect wild foods from forests and so that increases their... depending on the quality of those foods so trees tend to give fruits, nuts. That directly might have positive impacts on people's diets. It could be because they hunt bush meat in forests and animal source foods are actually the richest source of micronutrients. So it's a very, very key food group. And then there's also the possibility that it's not direct food and it's not so much the ecosystem services or the forests or maybe this is linked to that but the type of agriculture that people tend to practice in areas where there's forests such as shifting cultivation and complex agroforestry systems might actually help diversify people's diets and give them access to more micronutrient rich foods. So in order to look at this question we combine data for children under five and the frequency that they ate foods from several different food groups that tend to be micronutrient rich in the last seven days. So this is data from the demographic health surveys that are funded by USAID and done in many, many developing countries. So Indonesia had one done in 2003. So we have data from all over, well, most of Indonesia with the representative survey and they ask mothers about how often their children ate from various food groups in the last seven days. So we're particularly interested in looking at those food groups that are micronutrient rich and we combine that data with information on GIS data on tree cover. So the DHS provides GPS coordinates for community locations, slightly jiggled a bit so that you can identify the particular community. So we look at the tree cover within a five kilometer radius of a community and try to investigate using a bunch of different control variables, whether there's a relationship between tree cover and consumption of micronutrient rich foods. So in doing so we found that there is a positive relationship between tree cover. I should say that we restricted the sample to only rural communities and only looked at one child under five per household and a child that was over 12 months so that they weren't mostly reliant on breast milk. So we found that children that live in communities where there was more tree cover consumed more animal source foods which as I said before is sort of the key food group in terms of providing micronutrients. They consumed more vitamin A rich fruits and consumed more other fruits and vegetables so that's kind of a big category that the DHS incorporates foods that are not orange, fleshy fruits or vegetables or green vegetables. So we think that that's a pretty exciting result but as we were drafting the paper and talking it over, we thought that maybe we could actually in the case of Indonesia we might be able to do better than that and look more specifically at what kinds of trees we were looking at. So the Africa study that Terry mentioned is we only looked at tree cover but in Indonesia we were able to get data from the Ministry of Forestry which actually classifies the kinds of trees that we could see. So very recently we disaggregated our tree cover group to look at natural forests, planted forests, plantations so that's like oil, palm, rubber, coffee would be in the plantations. And then they have another category which doesn't fit into those categories so it could be anything from roads, land, open savanna, bush and key for us, mixed systems where there's trees but it doesn't fit into any of their other categories so these are trees around communities. So we also divided the trees in the other category so these are trees around people's communities again into low, medium and high. So for low we have less than 20% for medium we have 20 to 50% and for high we have over 50%. And so we looked at the relationship between all of our food group, frequency of food group consumption and the different classes of trees and this is where things where Terry was kind of trying to sell this look some more exciting and maybe a little bit more contentious. So we found that for animal source food consumption natural forests had a positive and statistically significant association. So that sort of supported our hypothesis because what we think is going on is that there's reliance on bush meat in communities where there's forests, surrounding forests. For vitamin A rich fruit consumption and other food and vegetable consumption and animal source food consumption as well we found that the strongest association of our classes was in the medium tree cover category around people's communities. So again that's tree cover between about 20 and 50%. So communities that live in children that live in communities where there's about 20, between 20 and 50% tree cover seemed not seemed. They consume more animal source foods. They consume more vitamin A rich fruits and more other fruits and vegetables. And then we also found a positive relationship between planted forests and vitamin A rich fruit consumption, meat consumption and legume consumption. And we found a positive relationship between legume consumption and plantation forests. So what do we think is going on? Well the nice simple story we have is for the bush meat and the natural forests. For the other categories it seems a bit more complex. So what our intuition tells us we might be wrong and it would be nice to hear from other people and what maybe other people suspect is going on maybe people that are more familiar with the Indonesian rural context is that the 20 to 50% tree cover is really indicative of shifting cultivation and smallholder agroforestry. And so communities that live that practice these types of agriculture seem to be consuming more micronutrient rich foods. For the planted forests we think it's probably infrastructure and logging roads that's making markets that has more easier access to markets and making foods more accessible. And for the plantation forests remember we only found one statistically significant relationship for the plantation forest and that was only for legumes. We are hypothesizing that that's probably a cultural issue because legumes in Indonesia tend to be tofu and tempi. And so that might be a cultural issue of particularly Javanese migrants working in oil palm plantations and having different cultural customs of what people eat. It could also be connected to maybe better infrastructure as with the planted forest although it would be strange that it's only showing up there. So in conclusion we have a strong relationship between tree cover and micronutrient rich food consumption in Indonesia and that we can assert really confidently. And then when we're looking at the particular trees that seem to be important for people's diets and whether those are forest or whether those are mixed multifunctional landscapes had to get that in. Those are questions that we need to explore further and we're interested in hearing from you to hear what people's ideas are for helping us to try to understand what our findings are. Thank you. Thanks Amy, that was an excellent summary of the research. I'm sure there are questions from the participants here so I opened the floor out for questions for Amy and maybe perhaps other members of the research team. You've wowed them Amy. I don't know if this is a question or an input but there's a plan for the Indonesian government to open up some forest land to become rice plantation or agricultural plantation and this is one of the plans of Prabowo or the future one of the candidates for the presidency. I'm just curious whether there's a correlation between forest conversion to become agricultural plantations such as plant with the nutrients itself because the reason behind that is they wanted to increase the economy and also increase the economy of the local community so they can buy more foods and more nutrition but is this logical and do you have any results on that? Thank you. I'd really like to see that speech where he says that because that sort of epitomizes what I said in the beginning that we often see that forests are pitted against food security a really good example where we know we need to conserve forests and that's a great thing but food security comes first. I didn't mention that we also looked at our data set to sort of verify that this is a result that William Sunderland and others published earlier more broadly but that in Indonesia communities that live closer to more tree cover also tend to be poor, lower incomes so we interpret that as saying that our result is not that it's because people are living in more tree areas that they have higher incomes and so are able to buy more foods that's not the case. It's actually even though they have lower incomes they tend to be eating more micronutrient rich foods so the example with rice is rice is an important part of diets and it provides calories and calories are important and as I said earlier depending on the estimates that you look at almost 30% of households in Indonesia don't have access to sufficient calories although it sounds to me like that's really rice for marketing and not really necessarily for subsistence consumption in communities so it's not clear that that would actually end up going to feed people that would be exchange in markets the idea I guess is to increase people's incomes and then with those higher incomes they should be able to purchase more nutritious foods and the data for that are not very convincing there's the link between incomes and dietary quality is very very weak and it can even actually be negative so it depends on where you are on the say if we imagine we have very very poor people, sort of poor people less poor people, middle income people and rich people, something like that there is, when you increase income at certain levels of income your dietary quality probably goes up because sometimes people can only afford to eat rice so as soon as people get a little bit more income and they can diversify a bit their dietary quality will improve but there's a huge range in which people's incomes go up and they buy food with less lower dietary quality like fatty foods, sugary foods, processed foods so if I were going to be president and I really wanted to address issues of malnutrition and under nutrition I don't think, actually I know that wouldn't be the policy I would go for Hi, thanks it was really interesting and I'd like you to explain a little more about this link between income and dietary quality does it have any effect on the distance to the forest let's say the relationship between income and dietary quality is different when you live near to the forest compared to when you're living far that's a really great question that I can't answer certainly not with this data set this data set all in terms of community location all we had was the one GPS coordinate for our community so I don't know which households are living closer which households are living further nor do we have that information for the other study that we mentioned but Ronwin has dissertation in Tanzania actually she does look a bit at that relationship right, do you want to say something? okay so I don't know that my dissertation in Tanzania is the best example but in developed countries these days the people who are food insecure are also the most micronutrient deficient but they also tend to have higher rates of obesity so they're eating too many calories and not enough micronutrients and increasingly in Indonesia and other Asian countries we see this it's called a double burden of malnutrition where people are obese but anemic or obese but vitamin A deficient so providing more rice or more income that relationship is very tricky my dissertation in Tanzania distance to forest there I sampled specifically to look at market access which was inversely related with forest cover and the people who were purchasing more food had much lower dietary quality and the people who were eating more wild and forest foods had better dietary quality and higher micronutrient intake so that's because choices around how to spend your money are not often not always directed towards micronutrient rich foods and there's all this psychological research that shows if you give people a buffet even 10 centimeters difference between the unhealthy food and the healthy food can make a difference to which foods people choose to eat very interesting presentation just a quick question what was the land cover in the places where the micronutrient deficiency was the greatest is it monoculture serial production is it a particular type of forest? that's not something that we looked at so I also it's not quite fair to say where micronutrient deficiencies were the highest because I don't have the data so what I have is the frequency with which people eat from various food groups some of which are more micronutrient rich so it would be a bit complicated but I think we probably could come up with some sort of index to combine all of those and sort of have a micronutrient rich index and then look at its distribution and its relationship to land cover that would be an interesting thing to do so we haven't done that but I think that's something that seems like it might be interesting to do sorry, thank you any other questions from the floor? yes please, Annie it's being recorded so you have to be mic'd up so I have two questions and one is we know that there's a relationship between land tenure and tree planting do you need me to stand up? I was just teasing there's in many places, especially in Latin America where I've worked there's a relationship between tree planting and land tenure so I'm wondering if your dataset has anything to say about the spatial overlay between land tenure security and the kinds of tree cover that produces micronutrient rich diets that looks like a no that's a definite no it's a demographic health survey where people ask questions about fertility it's more like a population type of survey where they don't look at institutions or the kinds of things it's not really for social scientists per se great, so my other question as a social scientist was do you have data on relative access to markets or how connected these communities are to markets because we also know from other places that micronutrient rich foods are very expensive to replace on the market and relative autonomy for markets for peasant producers can actually produce better food security outcomes so not directly we do have so because I used another GIS dataset I do have we were able to calculate distance to coast and distance to closest small city so that's sort of in our minds a proxy for access to markets and sort of my intuition tells me where I think where you're coming from I think that it might be actually a negative relationship in some sense between market access and the consumption of micronutrient rich foods and so that's why I was a bit surprised that we did actually find a positive relationship for places that had more planted forests and my guess is as I said that that's probably because of better infrastructure so I wasn't expecting that we would find out what we did so in this case it might be that the stronger relationship was still with the medium tree cover so that in terms of magnitude that outweighed the impact of the planted forests it also might be something else going on but with this dataset it's hard to get any more precise than that which is why we feel like these are such interesting questions particularly in Indonesia that we think that we should actually try to collect our own data to try to tease out some of these things ladies in front I would like to know if you have more information about New Open Area when there is some population movement Some what movement? Some population movement who go to live in New Open Area for work there and nearly close the forest but we don't have the local knowledge for managing it and find the food here if there is a link or if somebody has to do that Are you asking when there is in migration of people from a different community and they move to a place where there is forest and then that they don't have knowledge of the local area and the local ecology so don't know what kinds of foods to eat It is an interesting question no I don't have that data and I don't know how I think in Indonesia from my limited knowledge and there's plenty of people here that can correct me if I'm wrong you don't really have people coming to a place where there is nobody already so you do have places where there is different during the transmigracie period you did have different ethnic groups coming but where there were already people that were living there and they do have it's hard to know how much of their my guess is that they would have different dietary patterns and some of that might be based on the knowledge of the local ecology and some of it might also be different cultural food dietary customs so it would be hard to separate that out but it's possible and an interesting question Can I ask a question? Do you mind? I think the results from the Africa study and this particular study in Indonesia are extremely compelling I mean the relationship between forest and nutrition is a very powerful message and it's one of those messages we've been sort of clinging on to in terms of the impact of forests on the wider social sector that we work with but so what? I mean what are the policy implications Kalina alluded to the political intent here in Indonesia to work on you know calories basically focus on more calorific production even the CG head of the consortium is talking about to feed 9 billion people in 2050 we need more calories, more calories, more calories and this is going to come with the expense of forests our results are showing actually for better diets forests and forested landscapes are extremely important how do we sort of turn things around policy-wise to actually get people to listen to this this message Thanks Terry well I think over the last maybe five years or so I think the voices the voices of nutritionists have become louder and people are listening more to them than they were before when you read you still read you know papers that start off with that same paragraph you know global population going to be 9 billion how are we going to feed all these people it's going to come to forestation you still read a bunch of those papers but there's more and more papers sometimes in the same journals where people bring up issues of micronutrient deficiency where you have like a whole movement of at least bringing nutrition nutrition and agriculture together maybe not forests yet but that's sort of that's sort of new nutritionists are talking to agricultural people and trying to think about how agriculture can be more nutrition sensitive and a lot of that has to do with micronutrients so I feel like that's a step in the right direction looking at the wider landscape and not just agriculture but looking at wild foods I think that's just the next step so I don't know how close we are to that but I think we're getting closer and I think these kinds of results and by some other people in the last few years you know sort of hot topic I think they still maybe not red hot but it's getting hotter I mean biodiversity is working on similar things these days the FAO had a meeting on forest and food security last year in the state of the world food security one in 2012 they had a little blurb forest and food security so I think it's going to take time but I think having more actual empirical evidence can only make a stronger case sorry about that time for one final question nope I've just been told there's no time for a further question 1035 so let me just thank you all for coming to another Science Attainer it was a very interesting talk and discussion and let me thank Amy in particular for her presentation thank you