In the face of inequalities across the Amazonian territory, United Nations guidelines and standards become tools for demanding public policies that ensure access to quality food in the world’s largest tropical rainforest.
Food insecurity in the Amazon is a problem that cannot be addressed without considering the climate changes impacting the region. Despite being an exceptionally rich area that produces a diversity of foods few regions on the planet can match, it still faces alarming levels of food and nutritional insecurity. Six of the nine states that make up the region have a proportion of households experiencing food insecurity above the national average.
It was this gap—between abundance and hunger—that motivated researcher Ananda Ridart, founder and executive director of the Aruanã Pan-Amazonian Institute, along with her team, to transform concern into concrete data and technical research into an advocacy tool.
The technical brief No. 01, “Food Security and Climate Change in Acre: Fragmentation, Vulnerabilities, and Pathways for Integration,” launched by Aruanã in Belém, is the first in a series the institute plans to produce on the relationship between food security and climate across the states of the Legal Amazon and the Pan-Amazon region.
Acre was chosen as the pilot territory. From there, the team compiled sociodemographic data, food and nutritional insecurity indicators, and information on agricultural production into an interactive dashboard, cross-referencing these with the climate vulnerabilities of each population group. The result makes it possible to see, side by side, who produces food in the territory and who is actually able to access it.
In addition to the quantitative analysis, the research examined state-level documents related to food security and climate change, assessing whether Acre’s public policies are aligned and whether they effectively consider the presence of socially marginalized populations. Through a classification matrix, each document is scored—a method that transforms a problem often treated abstractly into something measurable and comparable across states.
For Ananda, this approach—combining technical rigor with the lived experience of those working in Amazonian territories—is directly linked to her participation in the ECOAR program.
It was during the project, promoted by IDDH, that she gained in-depth exposure to international guidelines and standards on food security, understanding how these frameworks should be reflected—and often are not—in national, state, and municipal public policies.
This experience provided the researcher and her team with the tools to question whether what is guaranteed on paper actually reaches Amazonian communities.
ECOAR did not only train a more prepared advocate to access international spaces; it also planted the seed for research that now returns to the Amazonian population data produced from the region’s own perspective.
By exposing the strengths, weaknesses, connections, and disconnects between food and climate policies, Aruanã offers community leaders, public managers, and policymakers concrete material to demand and build more just and effective policies.
This is the kind of outcome that confirms ECOAR’s purpose: transforming technical training into a real tool for defending rights and advancing political advocacy.
