Jhum Farming And Climate Change

Unfortunately the perception on shifting cultivation is a very negative one and policies or government programmes which have been designed to manage shifting cultivation have always tried to replace shifting cultivation with settled agriculture. What happens in that is - One, immediately there is a reduction in terms of the biodiversity which is there; because settled agriculture means either irrigated paddy cultivation or it means cash crop plantations. And cash crop plantations, when we come more towards the Northeast, what we find is- it's a combination of cashew nut, it's a combination of rubber or tea, more recently. Now these are all mono-crops. But if you look at what communities have been trying to do, they go in for arecanut because the traders come to them, it is non-perishable which can be stored and they get a fairly good return out of that. Unfortunately, with climate change what has been happening is, that even the arecanut has been susceptible to pests and they have been susceptible to the depletion of soil moisture. Now, when we look at these, what we find is that Government programmes or approaches, one have not understood what is the size behind shifting cultivation; and therefore with the replacement of shifting cultivation with plantation crops or cash crops, they have made the communities more vulnerable. And this has become accentuated because of climate change. But also in the process, more and more land is being converted into cash crop plantations and these are all fallows. The result has been that these cash crop plantations which have come up at the cost of the fallows have permanently changed the land use pattern. And now what you have is large areas of land where earlier if they were under shifting cultivation, forests would have regenerated. Today, you find that those forests are gone. So as a result, what you find is that the forests have depleted, water availability or the hydrological cycles have been impacted, springs which used to be perennial before have dried up. But with climate change and the delayed rainfalls or the shortened time period in which you have the rains now, these streams remain dry for most of the year. But when the rains come, because of the increase in the intensity of rainfall, there is more severe erosion and there is loss of topsoil which is there. In the long run, this does not perform well. And these are important factors which reduce the productivity and increase the stress on these upland farmers. However, the silver lining is that among these shifting cultivation fields and among the farmers, you do still have quite a wide diversity of crop variety which are resistant to such stress. This is where we need to make efforts to study and come up with technology and approaches which address mountain agriculture, which blends in the traditional approaches of these farmers with modern science. It's a cultivation which links us to land. You just don't grow only potatoes or you just don't grow only rice. The Jhum cultivation gives you your food, it gives you your medicine, it gives you your trees for firewood, it gives you your livelihood. So when an indigenous community is cut off from there, then you do not know how else to exist. Its like taking somebody from the Newyork and putting him in the midst of a Jhum cultivation- he will be lost.