Communities and livelihoods

Think of sardines and most people think of those that come tightly packed in a tin. Our PhD candidate Kim Hunnam is working on changing that perspective. Read Kim’s award-winning blog about her research investigating Timor-Leste’s sardine fisheries and the business of getting sardines from the ocean to the dinner plate.

RIEL researchers Sean Bellairs and Penny Wurm are supporting the development of a northern Australia wild food sector. This work includes two major projects - a Future Food Systems CRC collaboration focuses on Indigenous led, packaged and culturally identified, high value native food products, and a CRC for Developing Northern Australia collaboration is helping to lay the foundation for northern Australia rice exports, with a goal to produce over one million tonnes of specialty rice annually.

RIEL researcher Rohan Fisher is working with international partners to assist Baka (Pygmy) communities in southeast Cameroon. These communities are learning how to better display and communicate their spatial data to inform discussions with different stakeholders to support Baka traditional hunting rights. Traditional hunting underpins Baka livelihoods, culture and wellbeing.

The tenure rights of Indigenous people who draw their livelihood from small-scale fishing are often unrecognised with significant repercussions. This research explores the political and legal foundation of these fisheries, drawing from international and domestic law, and learning from situations in four countries - Norway, Australia, South Africa and Nicaragua.

As in other post-conflict contexts, Timor-Leste’s agrarian society is struggling to achieve food security and reduce undernutrition, while climate change poses further challenges to food production. We propose approaches including making agriculture more nutrition- and gender-sensitive, as well as promoting biodiversity and climate-smart practices to enable sustainable and healthy rural livelihoods. Improving agriculture productivity is also critical to support the availability of sufficient and nutritious foods.

An evaluation of recent initiatives on gender, women and sustainable livelihoods in small-scale fisheries in Indonesia suggests we need to better understand the role of gender in reducing poverty and increasing well-being. Lessons from comparable agricultural settings suggest that this may be facilitated by locally situated gender social relations analysis, integration of gender throughout livelihood improvement project cycles, gendered capacity building activities and learning from the gendered outcomes of project activities.