Food relief is directly related to medical attention and provided to patients suffering from malnutrition; babies, children, adults  and the elderly.

However, when the COVID crisis appeared in the Amazon in March 2020, it unleashed a humanitarian disaster. A disproportionate number of families were eating once every 2 or 3 days. Particularly disturbing was the plight of children, who literally went to bed on empty stomachs, crying themselves to sleep.

Since March 2020, malnutrition spread like wildfire, further complicated by tuberculosis which reared its ugly head in numerous areas.

Within this context,  SVSF enacted an Emergency Food & Medical Relief Operation, providing food relief once a month, as well as coordinating disease control with medical teams in the field.

Food relief during the COVID 19 pandemic has three objectives:

The first is to eliminate hunger and starvation by providing extended families with sufficient food supplies to cover their basic nutritional  needs for a minimum of six weeks. This process has been repeated on different occasions during 2020-2021.

In this manner, a secondary objective was met as the beneficiaries refrained from travelling to COVID infected urban areas to purchase supplies and thereby, avoided the spread of the virus within their communities.

If people are starving, it is clear that they will not be receptive to environmental conservation. Illegal hunting in national parks and protected areas increased substantially during the initial months after COVID travel restrictions were imposed. All SELVA-Vida Sin Fronteras activities are constantly monitored and evaluated, and they suggest that our comprehensive food relief program has been successful in reversing this tendency, proving that humanitarian crisis and the preservation of flora and fauna is plausible, which precisely constitutes the third objective of the program.

The indigenous communities have always been resilient in face of almost insurmountable obstacles, but we cannot assume that they are capable of doing so indefinitely, without our concerted efforts.