The measurement of food security among Indigenous Peoples: a scoping review

By nearly every conventional metric, Indigenous Peoples globally experience disproportionately high rates of food insecurity. Conventional approaches to measuring food security rely primarily on economic indicators to assess barriers to food access. This limits the utility of these tools when applied to Indigenous Peoples because conventional approaches do not account for additional sociocultural and biophysical variables associated with the harvest of traditional foods, and lack the ability to identify vulnerability to future food insecurity. Applying a holistic framework, such as One Health, to a vulnerability analysis of food insecurity may be a means to bridge these gaps. The objective of this scoping review was to evaluate the use of this approach when measuring food security in Indigenous populations. Following the Joanna Briggs Institute guidelines, a scoping review of English-language scholarly and gray literature was conducted to evaluate how food security has been measured in Indigenous populations that harvest traditional foods around the world. We defined the harvest of “traditional foods” as a way of living off the land to fulfil economic, physical, cultural, and spiritual needs, which include hunting, fishing, gathering, and cultivating one’s food to obtain a significant portion of one’s food, shelter, clothing, and tools. Peer-reviewed literature was retrieved from PubMed, Scopus, Wiley Online Library, Web of Science, and ProQuest. Gray literature was retrieved through searches on government pages and public health and nutrition assistance-related program websites. Results included 43 documents (39 peer-reviewed, two reports, and two graduate theses). A majority of the documents used a food security measurement tool that incorporated indicators of traditional food access ( n = 38; 88%), two articles (5%) used a One Health framework, and only one (2%) measured vulnerability to food insecurity. The majority ( n = 29; 67%) of the studies used an economic-focused food security measurement tool, or a modified version of it. Economic-centric measurement tools remain dominant in the food security literature, and a significant gap remains in the use of more holistic, preventative approaches. These approaches are critical for the accurate measurement of food security and the reduction of food insecurity among Indigenous Peoples.