Informal supply chains of wild meat from rural Amazonia and food security in an urban center

Iquitos, the most populated city in the Peruvian Amazon, is a hub in the regional supply chain of wild meat and supplies urban consumers. Studies on wild meat consumption have focused primarily on markets, limiting the scope of species considered to those that are economically valuable and potential inferences from those data. We conducted interviews with 1548 households in Iquitos across all four districts to assess wild meat consumption rates for 7831 people in those households. We used species- and source-specific conversion factors to estimate biomass consumed from different species and sources in the supply chain. We estimated that 1786 t (95% CI 636.48-3317.62) of wild mammal meat were consumed in 2019 in Iquitos, which is about 4.25 kg (95% CI 1.54-8.02) per person per year. Markets supplied 57.22% of all wild mammal meat, but 14.67% was purchased from other sources and 27.85% was not purchased. Paca (Cuniculus paca) and collared peccary (Dicotyles tajacu) were the most heavily consumed species, mostly from markets. The majority of meat from other species, such as the woolly monkey (Lagothrix lagotricha) and capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris), was traded outside markets. Our results indicated that wild mammal consumption rates may be much higher in Iquitos than previously reported, likely because social connections accounted for about half of the supply chain; consumers are receiving wild meat as gifts or were hunting themselves. The breadth of mammal meat consumption demonstrates the contributions of hunting to the food security and economic stability of consumers in Iquitos and the potential for sustainable supply chains of some mammals.