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International programs for combating food insecurity including the recent FAO 'How to Feed the World in 2050: High-level Expert Forum' promote agricultural intensification among the main solutions to global hunger. We argue here that hunting and gathering on land and at sea will often result in less food insecurity than farming. In southwestern Madagascar, questionnaire data find farmers more food insecure than neighboring forest foragers and marine foragers. Production data show that farmers produce a greater quantity of food energy, but foragers sell their goods for higher prices resulting in comparable market-valued incomes among all three subsistence modes. A stochastic model finds farming portfolios an order of magnitude more risky (lower z-scores) than foraging portfolios, except when foraging portfolios have low means. This is because farmers experience only three to five harvests per year while foragers may experience 365 harvests. As farmers await future harvests of uncertain quantity, they are more likely than foragers to depend on formal and informal credit. The stochastic model shows that diversification, mixing foraging with farming, can only reduce the risks of farming under limited conditions. We conclude that pressuring foragers to become farmers will increase rather than diminish regional food insecurity. Key words: food insecurity, risk, hunter-gatherers, coastal economies, agriculture, Madagascar

The study finds low to moderate intergenerational wealth transmission in the hunter-gatherer societies of the Ache in South America, the Lamalerans of southeast Asia, the Hadza and Ju/'hoansi of sub-Saharan Africa and the Meriam of Melanesia. Findings on moderate wealth inequality in certain wealth types and implications for future research are provided.

Julian Steward has presented Western Shoshones as a pristine group of hunter-gather-foragers. However, it is more accurate to conceptualize this group as 'victims of progress' and three cases of the tribe's subsistence is discussed to support and illustrate this point.

The way that feasting contributes to fitness in traditional societies as a risk-reduction strategy is discussed. Feasting creates inflationary food production forces in hunter-gatherer societies which lead ultimately to the domestication of plants and animals.

We argue for attention to the evolutionary origins of economic behaviour. Going beyond this, we argue that the economy of hunting and gathering was the context in which evolution shaped human characteristics that underlie modern economic behaviour. We first reconsider the basic biological question of why aging occurs at all. We then illustrate the usefulness of considering foraging economics by asking why it is biologically advantageous for humans to live long after their reproductive career is over. Further, we argue that foraging economics would have led to the simultaneous exaggeration of intelligence and of longevity that is characteristic of humans.

We use microeconomic theory to frame hypotheses about the effects of income on the use of non-timber rain forest products. We hypothesize that an increase in income: (a) encourages foraging specialization, resulting in the extraction of fewer goods; (b) increases the share of household income from occupations besides foraging; (c) produces a yearly value from the extraction of nontimber forest goods of about $50 per hectare; and (d) produces depletion of forest goods entering commercial channels and sustainable extraction of goods facing cheaper industrial substitutes. To examine these hypotheses we present worldwide ethnographic information and preliminary findings from field work carried out among the Sumu Indians of Nicaragua. Field work suggests that higher income produces: (a) foraging specialization with animals rather than with plants; (b) a decline in the economic importance of forest goods in household income; (c) and a rise in the value of non-timber goods removed from the forest to about $35/ha/year. We did not have time to test hypothesis "d." KEY WORDS: non-timber forest products; biological sustainability; forest valuation; foraging; economic development; Sumu Indians; Nicaragua.

The circumstances under which a rice-based agriculture system by hunter gatherers are examined. Central to our understanding of the origins of food production in Southeast Asia involves increased understanding of the antiquity of other low-level food production.