The Nutritional Role of Indigenous Foods in Mitigating the HIV/AIDS Crisis in West and Central Africa

This paper examines the responsive capacity of the forest foods through domestication and commercialisation for resource-poor vulnerable and affected rural families to the negative socioeconomic impacts and livelihood threats from the HIV / AIDS pandemic. It elaborates the role of local food-based approaches in a context where the goals are the immediate as well as of long-term maintenance, resistance and resilience of rural people to the disease while meeting their food security needs, maintaining their natural resources base, and the long-term conservation of indigenous fruit and vegetable species in particular and biodiversity in general. From investigation the figures indicate that wild foods may be cheap, nutritious, economically beneficial and their production less labour-intensive. Moreover, wild foods may constitute an alternative to food shortages and incomes problems caused by HIV / AIDS if existing added value technologies are improved and appropriate ones developed and made available to farmers for use at low cost.