Honglin Khiamniungan (65) is seen here standing at the door of her granary in Tuensang, whose thatch roof was built with the help of other villagers.
65-year-old, widowed, with her children having left her, Honglin Khiamniungan from Thang village in Tuensang district has only her grains as security. Still able to cultivate her field through jhum, she has 11 containers (1 container holds about 60 tins, or about 1200 kilograms) of Foxtail millets, and one small container of Proso millets. These are her life’s savings. Once she is too old to farm, Honglin expects to be looked after by youth from the village, as well as by her neighbours.
The generation after Honglin may not be as fortunate, if her condition can be termed so, because agriculture patterns and attached community ethics are rapidly changing in Nagaland. If taste, nutrition and durability decided what crops a Naga farmer would pick in the yesteryears, largeness and marketability are factors they have been asked to choose today.
“There has been a decrease in bio diverse farming, traditional to Naga cultivation, and increase in mono cropping with the advent of cash crops,” says Wekowe-ü Tsuhah, who works with Naga farmers on a regular basis through the North East Network in Nagaland. Cash crops (timber, rubber, cardamom, ginger, etc.) have been promoted on a wide scale by different departments of the Government of Nagaland to increase the cash economy of the people—to the extent that food and nutrition have been rapidly replaced by cash.
Ironically, in the past 50 years, poverty in Nagaland has risen more than in any other State in India, according to the Planning Commission of India’s report in 2009-10. A territory that had survived for centuries without any State administration has become impoverished in the last five decades of governance.
Wet Terrace Rice Cultivation (WTRC) has also been pushed to cut down on the “environmental damage” supposedly caused by jhum (subsistence/shifting) cultivation, aka ‘collective work.’ “As per our study, area under subsistence cultivation has decreased in all districts except Mon, Longleng and Kiphire,” affirms Vangota Nakhro, a long time leader with the Nagaland Empowerment of People through Economic Development (NEPED), noting this to be a problem as “we find that there is no agricultural system that adapts better to climate change than shifting cultivation.”
In part, this has also been accepted by farmers as less labour is needed on terrace fields as compared to a jhum field. Then, “men do not render enough labour required for jhum, concentrating instead on earning daily wages,” say women farmers from villages across Nagaland.
While State schemes might have opened up a way for the Naga rural populace to earn more, the policy seems to have led to “dwindling of the culture of work and toil,” notes Tsuhah, as “easy money” is available through schemes and selling land to those who can plant large scale cash crops (giving rise to a growing section of landless people in Nagaland). “Young people feel much more alienated from land today,” she says.
Women who held vast knowledge of soil types and agriculture techniques now find themselves completely marginalized. Though many have indicated that they do not want any more new crop varieties pumped into their fields, they are not ones to decide what to plant or avoid—this decision is made by village authority, a stronghold of men. So while men work a lot less on the field, leading to the inadvertent “feminization” of agriculture in Nagaland, the latter is becoming a slave population with more strange crops being pumped into their fields without their consent. Of this they have limited knowledge or cultural affiliations and marketing is often a hassle.
Misinformation is galore too. “A government official once came and told us that millets are like mud,” reports a farmer from Noklak in Tuensang district, known to cultivate plenty of millets that are, in fact, far superior to rice in nutrients. Millets are said to facilitate bio diverse agriculture, allowing as many as 60 crops to grow along side it on a jhum field. WTRC, however, depends heavily on timely rain and the only other things that grow with paddy on such are small fish, snails and frog.
“Currently we are driven by the funds available from outside rather than the needs of the people,” explains Nakro, of the government set up. “Though farmers also need to gain purchasing power, our prime focus should be on food security and sovereignty. Keeping climate change in mind, monocropping could make our population highly vulnerable,” he suggests, adding, “In this, we have to revive highly climate change resilient crops like millets. Shifting cultivation needs to be revived, not abandoned.”
An official of the Krishi Vigyan Kendra suggests that various departments of the government, agriculture or horticulture, have been giving varied options to the farmers which involve the sowing of cash crops which fall at odds with the concept of food security leading to farmers being increasingly confused and opting for whichever crop whoever suggests will fetch them the best price for that year. “Such practices need to be controlled and the government needs to have coherent plans on the same,” he suggests, a suggestion similar to Nakro’s: “departments with overlapping areas is alright as long as their policies and practices are synchronized.” Which, 50 years down the statehood lane, it is not.
