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How Well do Foragers Protect Food Consumption? Panel Evidence from a Native Amazonian Society in Bolivia

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Abstract

The ability of rural people to protect their food consumption matters because it captures their economic vulnerability. How well do foragers protect consumption from adverse income shocks and does protection work equally well for all people in the household? We answer the queries with data from 156 adults and 169 children collected over five consecutive quarters from the Tsimane’, a native Amazonian society of foragers and farmers in Bolivia. We estimate whether quarterly changes in the logarithm of consumption bear an association with quarterly changes in the logarithm of cash income while controlling for many confounders, including covariant shocks. We use anthropometric indices of short-run nutritional status to proxy for food consumption and use instrumental variables to abate biases from the endogeneity of income. We found that child consumption was fully protected from income growth, but adult consumption was not as well protected. Estimates of income elasticities of consumption fell toward the lower range of estimates from previous studies of farming and industrial societies. We present several hypotheses to explain how the Tsimane’ smooth consumption.

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Acknowledgements

Research was funded by two grants from the National Science Foundation (SBR-9731240 and SBR-9904318), a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and a grant from the Conservation, Food & Health Foundation. We would like to thank Jonathan Morduch for help with the analysis, Lilian Apaza and Eddy Pérez for helping to collect the information, and anonymous reviewers of Human Ecology.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sustainable International Development Program, MS 078, Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, 02454-9110, USA

    Ricardo Godoy

  2. ICREA and Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 08193, Bellatera, Barcelona, Spain

    Victoria Reyes-García

  3. ICRISAT, Patancheru 502 324, Andhra Pradesh, India

    Vincent Vadez

  4. Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, 60208, USA

    William R. Leonard

  5. International Food Policy Research Institute, 2033 K Street, NW, Washington, DC, 20006-1002, USA

    Elizabeth Byron

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  1. Ricardo Godoy
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  4. William R. Leonard
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  5. Elizabeth Byron
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Correspondence to Ricardo Godoy.

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Godoy, R., Reyes-García, V., Vadez, V. et al. How Well do Foragers Protect Food Consumption? Panel Evidence from a Native Amazonian Society in Bolivia. Hum Ecol 35, 723–732 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-006-9099-9

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