309-Amazonia's Wild Meat: Nutritional Lifeline and Decline

Paper Talk · Dec 11, 2025 · 16m

The research utilizes an extensive dataset of animal harvests across 625 rural Amazonian localities to quantify the critical role of wild meat in sustaining the region's inhabitants. The study estimates that approximately 0.34 million metric tons of edible wild meat are extracted annually, supplying nearly half of the required daily intake of protein and iron, along with essential B vitamins, for over 10 million rural Amazonian peoples. This traditional food system, which relies heavily on mammals like peccaries and large rodents, is shown to be severely threatened by human-driven…