Human Ecology, Vol. 32, No. 4, August 2004 ( C© 2004)

Book Reviews

The Penguin Atlas of Food. By Erik Millstone and Tim Lang. PenguinBooks, New York, 2003, 128pp. INDEX, ISBN 0-14-200224-0.

This book’s goal is to address the question “If the world producesenough food to feed everyone in the world, why do 40 million people diefrom hunger-related diseases every year?” The authors show how the foodchain is affected by changing lifestyles, political economy, history, and nat-ural disasters. The three-page introduction highlights the theme that poornutrition is not a result of food scarcity but rather of poverty and lack of re-sources and access to food. The book traces the interconnections and pathsof the food supply chain, as well as the increasing distance between pro-ducer and consumer, which frequently results in food contamination. Theauthors also critically examine the role of cheap oil in making extensivefood transport possible, with resulting damaging fuel emissions contribut-ing to climate change problems. They suggest that current modes of foodproduction, processing, transport, and consumption prevail because in theshort term they are the most profitable. But they believe that they are notthe most healthy or the most environmentally sustainable. They argue formore rational and just food policies.

The book is divided into five parts. Each of the first four consists ofa number of two-page sections, consisting of a text introduction accompa-nied by tables and maps illustrating the main issues. For example, Section1 of part one, entitled Feeding the World, describes the numbers of peoplethroughout the world suffering from undernutrition, and provides world-wide food production data. The section includes a world map showing av-erage daily caloric consumption by the country, a figure showing world’sover- and undernutrition, as well as a graph illustrating average grain pro-duction per person by region of the world. Part one, entitled, ContemporaryChallenges, covers issues such as population and productivity, environmen-tal challenges, water, food-borne disease, under and overnutrition, food aid,

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0300-7839/04/0800-0523/0 C© 2004 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.

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and food aid as power. Part two deals with farming, part three trade, andpart four processing, retailing, and consumption. Part five, World Tables,provides tables on agriculture and consumption worldwide.

A number of the topics covered are critically important for under-standing contemporary issues related to food consumption and food policy,including animal feed, pesticides, agricultural biodiversity and sustainablefarming, worldwide animal transport, food miles, and food additives. Theauthors also examine the issue of power, from the alternative perspectivesof food aid, the giant, often multinational, food processing companies, andthe retail market. And the important First World issues of eating out andfast food consumption are also addressed.

This book is very well suited for use in classes on nutritional anthro-pology, food and culture, and/or development. It provides a brief yet clearoverview of the macro-context—political, economic, and agricultural—which is often omitted from the anthropological microcultural focus onthese topics. Another aspect of the book that I particularly liked was thatas an English publication its maps do not locate the United States in thecenter of the pages, but rather off to one side. Data and examples aregiven from many different countries; we learn that the Japanese eat moreper person meals out than do people in the United States, as do, to alesser extent, most western Europeans. Students in the United States needto learn that the rest of the world exists, and this book will help in thatprocess.

The final section of the book gives references for each chapter. Unfor-tunately, these are mostly websites; it would have been useful to have pro-vided more traditional references as well. My only other reservation aboutthe book is a question of how fast it will become outdated—although thegeneral patterns discussed have will and persist for some time, the statis-tics themselves will of course change somewhat, it is to be hoped for thebetter.

In summary, this book provides an interesting and accessible approachto some very important material and should have a place as a text in a num-ber of different types of classes devoted to the interactions of food, soci-ety, and culture. It will also make informative reading for the lay readerinterested in these issues.

Roberta D. BaerDepartment of AnthropologyUniversity of South FloridaTampa, Florida 33620–8100e-mail: baer@cas.usf.edu

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People and Forests. Communities, Institutions and Governance. Edited byClark C. Gibson, Margaret A. McKean, and Elinor Ostrom. MIT Press,Cambridge and London, 2000, 298pp, $70.00. ISBN 0–262–07201–7.

The scholarly study of forests is changing. The formerly exclusive intel-lectual domain of forestry science is now the contested scene of global andlocal public policy debates and an area of convergence for an increasinglydiverse group of scholars. Large-scale industrial forestry practices, acceler-ated by technological innovations and increasing globalization, and aimedlargely at the production of fibre or at the conversion of forest land to otheruses, have become a focus of environmental and economic concerns, fromglobal warming to biodiversity and soil erosion, and from economic devel-opment to access to subsistence resources. At the same time a new under-standing of forests is emerging, one that does not see them simply as naturalecosystems that have trees, but also as environments occupied by peopleswho use and manage them for a variety of purposes, and who use systems ofknowledge, tenure arrangements, values, and spiritual ideas to imagine andcongnitively construct them as landscapes and homelands. Forests are in-creasingly being seen as important, but for much more than the productionof timber.

Forests are thus being recognized by scholars as social and cultural,as well as natural, phenomena, within a growing interdisciplinary field ofstudy that we may term social forestry. And since forests are to be foundin most parts of the inhabited world, social forestry has a virtually world-wide comparative frame of reference. A similar global comparative ap-proach has been applied to other kinds of landscape regions, such as islands,oceans, deserts, and mountainous regions. By taking the perspective of so-cial forestry we might examine what is common to the way of life of forestdwellers, as documented in ethnographic studies. From these studies wenote that forest environments generally have a multiplicity of uses for thepeople who live in or near them. Non-Western forest peoples have systemsof knowledge of these environments that are often as detailed and as sys-tematic as Western science, although frequently based on quite differentclassificatory principles.

Can we make use of this understanding that local people around theworld have historically managed their forest environments on a generallysustainable basis, and apply it to current global public issues, like the threatposed by deforestation? This seems to be one of the motivating ideas thatunderlies the book People and Forests, as well as the research project outof which it comes. The research project, the International Forestry Re-sources and Institutions (IFRI), as explained in the book’s preface and in

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an appendix, was initiated with the idea that the health of the forests ofthe world depends, to an extent heretofore insufficiently recognized, on thesystems of management of the local people who make use of them, wholive in or near them, and who possess, systems of knowledge about them.The project set out to collect data to describe all forms of management byfollowing a standardized data-gathering format, by the use of GIS data tomonitor forest inventories, and by collecting a wide range of other data onmatters that could influence the condition of forests. The management dataare collected in a form that allows analysis of the features that distinguishsuccessful cases and the organizational principles that characterize them.While the practicalities of the research project are limited by its sources offunding, its scope is in principle global.

The book includes a general introduction by the editors, a theo-retical chapter on common property land tenure systems by MargaretMcKean, a set of six case studies, two from Nepal (Charles Schweik,George Varughese) and one each from North India (Arun Agrawal),Uganda (Abwoli Banana and Willian Gombya-Ssembajjwe), Ecuador(Clark Gibson and C. Dustin Becker), and Bolivia (C. Dustin Becker andRosario Leon), and a concluding chapter by the editors.

The case studies in this book were conducted under the aegis of theIFRI research project and animated by its central ideas. To simplify some-what, the cases seek to show that to understand why forests are either wellor poorly managed we need to shift our attention from the macro economicand environmental level, which has dominated much of the scholarly studyof forests to date, to the micro, local, or social side of forestry. In otherwords, the initiators of the IFRI project assert that it is important to con-sider the activities of local groups of forest users who have a direct stake inhow resources are exploited and shared. In outlining their perspective in theIntroduction, the editors applaud and associate themselves with what theysee as a new trend toward the inclusion of local peoples and their institu-tions in forest management arrangements, explicitly challenging previouslypredominant macrolevel approaches depending on state authority.

Forests, like oceans, are environmental contexts that have a specialplace in the now familiar debate over the commons, tragic or otherwise. Thechapter by McKean expresses a core theoretical position shared by the casestudies in this book, and by the global research project from which the casestudies came. This utilizes a refined typology of common property forms,and the institutional arrangements that underlie them. The importance ofthe distinction between “private” and “individual” is emphasized, althoughanother aspect of property, the right of disposal or transfer in tenure ar-rangements, is not discussed in any detail. What needs to be studied, ac-cording to this theory, are the specifics of the institutional forms and rules

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by which local people come together to act collectively in the defence offorest sustainability, and how these are used in practice.

All of the case studies examine instances of variation in forest man-agement within a single region. In most cases the local knowledge, beliefs,and values related to the forest are not analysed in much detail, as they arecommon to all the variants and are effectively held as a constant. Agrawal’schapter examines nine forest councils in the Himalayan region of Kumaon,India, all having forests at similar elevations and with similar access to mo-torable roads, but otherwise different in terms of other local conditions andin their management success. The author focuses in particular on the size ofthe councils, producing evidence that challenges the view that the smallerones are necessarily more effective. Banana and Gombya-Ssembajjwe’schapter looks at five forests in Uganda that differ in their ecology, as wellas the degree of illegal logging and grazing activities in them. They find thatmanagement of forests, whether government or private, works best wherethe rules are stable and the local community is involved in monitoring them.

Schweik’s chaper on the Chitwan district of southern Nepal looks atvariations in distribution of a particular tree species of special local valuein a variety of forests. By testing three hypotheses, he concludes that thepattern of abundance is explained by a combination of optimal foragingtheory and local institutional factors. Gibson and Becker’s chapter on thefog forests of the Loma Alta commune of the Ecuador highlands, in whichthe local community has the legal right to use and manage the land, in-cludes land that has been assigned to individuals, while the rest, which theauthors note is not well managed, is held collectively. Despite the existenceof the institutional framework for local management, it is suggested thatdeforestation is occurring because people of the study area had conflictinginterests in land.

Becker and Leon look at three Yuracare settlements along the RioChapare in Bolivia, and show that while market pressures are bringingchanges, forests continue to be managed so as to increase game animalsand locally preferred fruit tress. The final case study by Varughese looks at18 communities in the Middle Hills of Nepal in which forest conditions varyfrom good to poor. He finds that population pressure does not account forthe differences, which are explained by the degree of effective institutionalregulation over forest monitoring and access.

We should note certain features of the book that appear to follow asomewhat different path from the IFRI project that spawned it. In the firstplace, the IFRI project sets out to collect data on forest management ina standard format, intended to allow global comparison, while the essaysin the book do not depend on these kinds of data, but take the form oflargely qualitative studies of details of particular regional forest conditions

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and management arrangements. This is not to say the studies do not haveanything in common. Each case study does address the question of the suc-cess or otherwise of variations in the local institutional arrangements in thesustainable management of the forests, and each author discusses the rea-sons he or she sees for these variations in performance. However, the fac-tors identified in each case study differ, largely on the basis of particularlocal conditions, so that few if any of the findings are of sufficient generalityto apply to all successful local management systems.

A second difference between the book’s case studies and the globalIFRI project is that the selection of the studies does not apparently aim toprovide a representative sample of the local forest management arrange-ments found around the globe. In my view it is regrettable that nowhere dothe editors explain how the selection of case studies was arrived at, apartfrom one relatively obscure footnote in the introductory chapter which ac-knowledges that cases in which the state is involved in forest managementto a major extent are not included, but that “future work will more directlydiscuss comanagement as a means of governing large forests (as contrastedto the smaller forests that are the focus of this book)” (p 23, my emphasis).Moreover, the studies do not include cases where large-scale industrial tim-ber harvesting is a major factor. This raises the question of whether thebook’s cases are intentionally slanted toward situations that are relativelyfavorable to local microlevel forms of management and unfavorable to stateand industrial macrolevel forest administration. I do not say this as a criti-cism, except that this kind of focus is not made clear to the reader.

The book’s editors do make it clear that they advocate local forms offorest management, although to their credit they do not assume that allsuch systems are equally effective. There is acknowledgement of some ofthe contemporary issues facing forest dwellers that are undermining theirability to manage their environments, such as market pressures, interven-tions of the state, and the arrival of industrial forestry operations. But otherfactors are not addressed or illustrated in this book’s case studies, Such asthe spread of roads and other forms of transportation, and the resultingincreased migration of outsiders into what were formerly isolated and self-sufficient regions. Once newcomers become established, they tend to maketheir own demands on local resources. They also become a political fact oflife in a region, petition for new rights and introduce new ideas and prac-tices, regardless of management institutions.

This is a useful book for anyone with an interest in the sustainable man-agement of forests, well written, with a clear theoretical and policy perspec-tive, coupled with a variety of rich empirical data in the case study chap-ters. Obviously, a book on a subject of this scope cannot cover all kindsof forests, or all kinds of forest management arrangements. That being the

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case, I would have liked a clearer and more explicit statement by the edi-tors of the particular part of this subject matter that they were intending tocover.

Adrian TannerMemorial UniversitySt. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada