Forests and trees support the livelihoods of more than five billion people worldwide, yet their contribution to food security and nutrition is still largely missing from national statistics and policy planning, according to a new report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
The report, titled “Forests for Food: Nourishing People, Sustaining the Planet”, was developed jointly with the Landscape Alliance and published on Tuesday, 15 September 2026. It sets out the role forests play in providing nutritious food, cutting hunger and poverty, and urges governments to fold forests into their agrifood system policies rather than treating them as a separate concern.
In the report’s foreword, FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu argued that bringing forests into national, regional and global strategies would make food systems stronger. “By working together and fully integrating forests into national, regional and global strategies, we can build agrifood systems that are more efficient, inclusive, resilient and sustainable,” he wrote.
The FAO framed the findings against a backdrop of persistent global hunger. It said about 645 million people experienced chronic hunger in 2025, a figure drawn from the latest State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report, while the world lost an average of 10.9 million hectares of forest each year over the past decade.
According to the FAO, deforestation and forest degradation reduce biodiversity, weaken ecosystem services and can ultimately undermine agricultural productivity and access to nutritious food. The report presents forest loss not only as an environmental problem but as a direct threat to what people are able to eat.
On the food that forests supply, the report said they provide fruits, nuts, tubers, mushrooms, edible insects and wild meat. It noted that more than 50,000 wild species are used for food, medicine and other purposes, of which at least 10,000 are consumed directly as food.
The FAO also pointed to how much these foods matter in specific communities. It said that in some forest-dependent areas, forest foods can supply up to 80 per cent of daily protein requirements, with wild leaves offering nutrients such as vitamin A, calcium and iron, and fruits, seeds, nuts, roots and mushrooms adding vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates, fats and protein.
The concern the report raises is that this reliance is not captured in the data governments use. When forest foods and forest-based income are left out of national accounts, the FAO argued, policymakers underestimate how many people would be affected by forest loss and how much food security depends on standing forests.
The message carries weight for Nigeria, where forests are under sustained pressure. Nigeria has one of the higher rates of forest loss in Africa, driven by expansion of farmland, logging, fuelwood collection and urban growth, and successive assessments have recorded a steady decline in the country’s forest cover over the past two decades.
Fuelwood remains central to that pressure. The FAO has estimated that about 2.6 billion people globally rely on woodfuel for cooking, and in Nigeria firewood and charcoal are still the main cooking fuels for a large share of rural and low income households, particularly as the cost of alternatives such as cooking gas has risen sharply since 2023.
That link ties the report to the wider affordability strain already facing Nigerian households. With food inflation running at 20.31 per cent year on year in July 2026 according to the National Bureau of Statistics, forest foods and wild-harvested produce serve as an informal safety net for many families, a role the FAO says is rarely acknowledged in formal planning.
The report does not present forests as a substitute for agriculture. Rather, the FAO positions them as complementary, noting that trees on and around farmland protect soil and water, help regulate the local climate and support the pollinators that many food crops depend on.
The document is a policy and research report drawing on data collated by the FAO and its partners rather than a record of new field measurements, and several of its headline figures, including the count of wild species used for food, echo estimates the organisation has published in earlier briefs on forests and agrifood systems. The report’s central call is for those figures to be built into the way countries measure food security in the first place.
What follows now rests with national governments. The FAO has recommended that forests be integrated into agrifood strategies, but the report itself carries no binding obligation, and whether countries such as Nigeria act on it will depend on domestic policy choices, budgeting and the strength of forest governance. The organisation’s position is that the cost of continued inaction will be measured not only in lost trees but in weaker nutrition for the billions who quietly depend on them.