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Paper abstract:

Ensuring physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food for a healthy and active life for all people is an ongoing global challenge. For mountainous regions in the so-called “developing world,” an increase in the number of people considered vulnerable to food insecurity has been noted since the turn of the millennium (Romeo et al. 2020). Remoteness due to challenging topography, natural hazards, and local impacts of global environmental change, have been identified as determinants that aggravate food systems, along with armed conflict, resource degradation, and limited access to markets, social services and facilities, and off-farm income opportunities. In Central Asia, development aligns with these global dynamics (ibid.; Dame 2018). Case studies have the potential to flesh out such general findings with detailed and context-specific accounts of the complexity of the subject under study, which can then be made available to policymakers, development practitioners, and civil society activists. Against this backdrop, this paper utilizes a case study conducted in the Pamirs of Tajikistan to address the question of how the human nutrition situation plays out in the specific local context of Zong, a remote, rural mountain settlement in Tajikistan's Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Province. The aim is to understand and reconstruct which conditions influence the general food situation on site, the parameters upon which unequal nutrition patterns of households in the community depend, and which dynamics these patterns exhibit in concrete cases over time during the course of one year. Multiple empirical research methods were used to generate the data of the study, including a group interview with local leaders, guided interviews with informed stakeholders, a standardized household survey, and the keeping of food diaries by representatives of selected households. Preliminary results show that a wide range of challenging conditions make food security difficult, that exceedingly close relationships exist between the socioeconomic status and dietary patterns of individual households, and that these patterns exhibit periodic and episodic fluctuations. After completion of the full analysis, the results will be made available to local decision-makers, as well as to non-governmental development organizations working in the study region of the Pamirs of Tajikistan to support informed decision-making.

Dame J. (2018): Food Security and Translocal Livelihoods in High Mountains: Evidence from Ladakh, India. Mountain Research and Development 38(4): 310–322.

Romeo R., Grita F., Parisi F. & L. Russo (2020): Vulnerability of Mountain Peoples to Food Insecurity: Updated Data and Analysis of Drivers. Rome.