While the Amazon rainforest has an abundance of jungles and forests, it lacks an abundance of good, healthy food for the people living there to eat.

This was the topic of Deborah Ballard-Reisch’s discussion and lecture, “Global Food Security: Exploring Food Insecurity in the Amazon River Basin of Peru,” at the Ulrich Museum last Thursday.

As part of World Hunger Awareness Day and WSU’s hunger awareness month, Ballard-Reisch said the lecture was intended to spread awareness about the reality of “food insecurity” throughout the globe.

Ballad-Reisch is a professor of Strategic Communication at WSU. She is also the Kansas Health Foundation Distinguished Chair in Strategic Communication.

In her job, Ballard-Reisch has worked with food banks and food organizations, and through these, she said she has gained “an interest into food insecurity” at home and internationally.

“I have been interested in food insecurity since 2009 when I started working with Numana, a food-packing organization out of El Dorado, Kansas,” Ballard-Reisch said. “And also becoming aware of food insecurity first in Haiti, and then through the Kansas Hunger Dialogues, focusing on hunger on-campus, but also keeping my eye toward interesting international issues.”

Her interest in international issues was peaked last year when a colleague persuaded her to come down to the Peruvian rainforest to view the situation of people living in river villages.

“I recognized that there are some really interesting food security dynamics there,” Ballard-Reish said. “The people in the river villages have a very erratic eco-structure. It floods, and then it’s dry, and then it floods, and then it’s dry. And so eating is a challenge.”

Despite the misconceptions that rainforests are places full of fruit, vegetables and edible plants, many people living in parts of the Peruvian rainforest suffer from a lack of food diversity. Their diets lack vitamin C, calcium and protein.

Poverty in the region also limits the health and education services available to people living there.

At the presentation, Ballard-Reisch shared stories and pictures from her time there and also offered some possible solutions to these issues.

Afterward, there was an opportunity for audience members to ask questions.

Additionally, attendees could buy photographs of the area, as well as hand-made crafts from the villages that Ballard-Reisch worked in.

WSU Liberal Arts senior Cassie Standley attended the talk and said she was surprised to learn about the malnutrition of people living in a rainforest.

“When I think of the jungle and around the Amazon River, I do think of a lot of fruits, and things that are rich in Vitamin C growing,” Standley said. “But that’s a common misconception, and that’s not really there and is a big problem in that area.”