Improving rural livelihoods and sustaining biodiversity

North-east India is a region renowned for its rich biodiversity, with many rare and endemic species. It is also home to many remote and vulnerable tribal communities that rely on slash-and-burn cultivation (jhum) for their basic subsistence. Population pressures are reducing regeneration cycles from ten years down to three in some cases. So is it possible to improve the livelihoods of these communities and at the same time protect and sustain this significant ecological activity?

Empowering communities and creating the foundation for a sustainable future

Poverty in India is essentially a rural problem, with almost one third of the country’s population living on less than a dollar a day. In the states of Meghalaya, Manipur and Assam – three of the seven states in north-east India – many poor and vulnerable people belong to tribal communities in small, isolated villages in the mountainous landscape. With their own cultures and languages, in the past the communities tended to be closely knit, having strong traditional institutions that usually excluded women from participating in village affairs. Over the past 150 years, however, successive waves of migration have rapidly changed the region’s social complexion. They have reduced traditional tribal groups to minorities in some areas and have fuelled an upsurge of feeling against ‘outsiders’.

Most communities rely on the cultivation of wetland rice in the valley bottoms, together with other crops grown on terraces in the foothills. They practise jhum –a long-established form of shifting cultivation. Land is cleared by slashing and burning in order to grow one or two crops. Traditionally, farmers then moved on to another area and left the land for up to ten years to recover its fertility naturally.

Some people argue that jhum is well adapted to the local climatic conditions and terrain and that clearing small patches of forest with long fallow periods can enhance the biodiversity of the landscape. Others, however, blame jhum for loss of forests and productivity, soil erosion and desertification. This view is reinforced by the increasing population pressures that have forced farmers to reduce the recovery cycle from ten years down to five, and in some cases even to three.

Rich and poor

In sharp contrast to the poverty of the rural population, the region is renowned for its rich biodiversity. It is one of only two areas in India classified as an ecological hot spot possessing rare and endemic species.

However, increasing jhum cultivation and indiscriminate mining of forest resources are threatening this reservoir of biodiversity. This has led to jhum becoming an undesirable farming practice and an unsustainable livelihood system for the majority of households.

It was essential to restrict jhum and the felling of forests in order to protect the region’s unique ecology. A nine-year, IFAD-funded project is focusing on improving the productivity of former short-cycle jhum plots through changes in crop mix and agronomic practices and by encouraging farmers to plant permanent plantation crops. It is also introducing alternative sources of income, such as forestry, agroforestry, livestock, fisheries and non-farm enterprises.

Involving communities

The project’s approach was to involve communities as a whole and to empower them to take responsibility for the changes by offering financial and technical support. Village communities formed natural resource management groups (NaRMGs) to facilitate the process, and by 2004 nearly 40,000 households in 867 villages had mobilized almost 1,000 groups. NaRMGs proved to be effective in initiatives requiring community action, such as fishing, aloe vera and passion fruit plantations and village-level support services for managing and maintaining springs. The provision of drinking water to over 400 villages and the construction of over 12,000 latrines not only reduced domestic drudgery for women and improved household hygiene, but served as incentives to bring about change in community attitudes and behaviour.

Across the three states, communities established biodiversity conservation areas, which would eventually be converted into community forestry areas to enable households to sustainably harvest timber and other forest products. In 2005, after six years of project activities, there were signs that this was beginning to occur. Many NaRMGs were taking on the wider responsibility of conserving and managing the natural resources on which their members’ livelihoods depend.

NaRMGs have initiated adult education programmes, and this has led to a wider awareness of the need for education, especially for girls. The groups have also been instrumental in transferring land belonging to tribal chiefs and private landowners to community ownership. In the Senapati district, for instance, the village chief agreed to donate 458 hectares of land to the local NaRMG.

Reducing dependence on jhum

On the home front, some 18,000 households have developed gardens.

This has reduced their reliance on jhum and has improved household food security. Whereas families would normally travel up to five hills away from their homes to find suitable jhum areas, the change to homestead gardening has reduced this to just half a hill.

Women in the communities have started other activities to move away from jhum. Some 2,000 self-help groups (SHGs) support alternative income-generating activities by providing loans to women for enterprises such as soybean cultivation, bee-keeping and duck and goat breeding.

Though some are still in need of support from the project, there is a good gender balance in all NaRMGs. This is surprising in such traditional communities. The status of women has improved through social mobilization and the establishment of SHGs, which have promoted savings, investment and income generation. Communities have begun to accept women’s participation, their changing role in the household and their inclusion in NaRMG decision-making.

Building confidence in the future

Less tangible is the change taking place in the mindset of the people.

NaRMGs and SHGs have instilled a sense of confidence in communities, and the groups are now seen as a means of breaking with the past. The project is creating a solid foundation on which people can build a sustainable future for both themselves and the unique ecological environment on which they depend.