Lancaster PhD graduate, Dr Daniel Tregidgo, explains how tough fishing in the flood period brings hunger to residents of the abundant Amazon, and appeals for help to bring supplies to Amazonian communities hit hard by Coronavirus.

I waited for five minutes until a duck finally gobbled up the soggy bit of bread that I’d dropped in the Lancaster Canal. I’d just come back from six months living on a boat in the Amazon. When I dropped any scrap of food in the river there, the water came immediately alive with piranhas and catfish, among others. The Amazon is a place of extreme abundance.

This ‘boat trip’ was in fact my PhD fieldwork. While it’s any ecologist’s dream to see the Amazon’s rivers and forests, what really fascinated me was how rural Amazonian people live within this environment. On my pilot study I’d seen a father and son skilfully catch the biggest freshwater scaled fish in the world (Arapaima gigas), and spent four sweaty hours carrying a pair of white-lipped peccaries (Tayassu pecari) back to the hunter’s house – two of four he had shot in the rainforest.

Father and son fishing for Arapaima gigas.

I was in the Amazon to study how local people use their environment for food. Back in the office in Lancaster I’d read that hunger and malnutrition was rife in the Amazon, and I wanted to understand how that could be true in such an incredibly rich environment. Me and my supervisor, Dr Luke Parry, suspected that the seasons had something to do with it. That gave me an excuse to visit a bunch of Amazonian communities not once, but twice – during the high and low water seasons.

In the high water season, local fishers would take me canoeing through the canopy of the flooded-forest, while in the low water season I would walk up vast sandy beaches to get from my boat to the villages. This is one of the biggest fluctuations in water levels on the planet – around 15 metres between my two field seasons.

The seasons transform both the landscape and the lives of local people. While in the low water season we would barbeque bumper fish catches on the beach, months earlier fishers would regularly come back from hours fishing in the flooded forest empty-handed, or with just a few little fish to feed their family. So hunger is seasonal - and of course they knew that – but nobody had ever measured it.

My home and research vessel during the low water season. A few months earlier, people would be canoeing through the canopy of the forest in the background to catch their fish.

So in April 2020 the British Ecological Society published these results, showing to the world that even highly-skilled harvesters living in the rich Amazonian floodplain go hungry. Basically, the massive influx of water during the high water season ‘dilutes’ the fish so much that it makes them really hard to catch, and the result is that many local people end up eating less and skipping meals.

This paper came out just as coronavirus was starting to become established in the remote Amazon. I had recently made the Amazonian town of Tefé (population, 60 thousand) my home, which had just a couple of dozen confirmed cases at the time. About five thousand rural families rely on Tefé as their urban hub, where many come to sell their rural products and buy what they can’t get from the forest and rivers.

I was getting reports from rural friends that they were afraid to come to town, for the risk of being infected. And they were right - Tefé has no intensive care unit – the nearest is over 500 km flight or boat ride away, and a month on (early June) it has two thousand confirmed cases.

All this was happening during the high-water season, which peaks in about May-June around Tefé. So, with colleagues, I wrote about how this was “The worst time for a pandemic – how coronavirus and seasonal floods are causing hunger in the remote Amazon”. As happy I am to have made people aware of an issue, what is needed now is immediate action.

Because I can’t risk spreading coronavirus to the vulnerable communities that I usually work in and because much of my work this year will be at my laptop, I decided to lockdown back in the UK. From here I still hope to prevent hunger, and reduce the spread of the coronavirus by helping people to self-isolate. I’m doing this by fundraising, and working with local people to purchase food, make masks, and deliver them to vulnerable families in the Tefé region. We have already delivered thousands of masks and hundreds of food packages using kind donations from my family, friends and colleagues. If you have a few spare pennies to rub together, please do the same.

Partners delivering some of our donations – May 2020.

Daniel Tregidgo did his PhD at Lancaster University, undertaking his fieldwork in the Brazilian Amazon, where he now lives and works. He is fascinated by the interaction between traditional Amazonian people and nature, producing interdisciplinary work about ecology and food security among fishing and hunting communities.

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