Hill-farming: the changing view
Faced with falling yields from their sloping or terraced fields, most hill farmers take one of three options: clear new land for farming, if available; resign themselves to smaller harvests; or leave the area for pastures new - often urban ones. There is of course a fourth option: to remain on the same land, and invest time, labour and capital in soil conservation. It tends to be an option favoured by governments, who would wish to slow the migration of landless labourers to urban slums, and by environmentalists, but not, on the whole, by farmers. Nepal is just one country where option three has been a popular choice: the typical Nepali family used to live somewhere in the mid-hills that lie to the south of the high Himalayas; now more than half of Nepal's people live in the Terai, the flat plain bordering the northern Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Some of the downhill migrants are farmers or traders who have made good, and raised enough money to build a house and buy a plot of flat, easily-farmed land in the south. Others are 'economic migrants', and many of these find themselves swelling the ranks of urban underemployed.
The increasing problem of soil erosion in hilly areas is usually attributed to population pressures: farming families have to extract more from their land, perhaps farming intensively on land that was previously used for grazing, and the traditional systems for maintaining soil quality are unable to cope. Addressing the problem has presented agriculture ministries with a major challenge, not least because the farming systems used by hill-farmers tend to be very complex, and the number of factors that influence their use of resources can be similarly daunting. Moreover, past experience has shown that even when workable technologies are developed, getting them adopted is another matter.
Little surprise then that the promised benefits of participatory research and extension are starting to attract attention among agricultural officers, whether government or NGO. The UK-based Natural Resources Systems Programme has been developing a number of such 'tools' to help extension staff get to grips with the complexity they find in hill-farm systems, and learn to see the whole degradation versus livelihood conundrum through the eyes of those that face it. Based on work with farmers in Sri Lanka, the programme has designed a series of frameworks for assessing levels of degradation, and comparing the various options for improvement. The strength of the frameworks lies in the fact that the criteria for assessment are not taken from textbooks, but from farmers' own perceptions of their land and its potential. For example, in calculating the costs and benefits of soil conservation, one framework considers changes in production as a result of declining fertility, loss of planting areas to conservation structures, multiple uses of hedges, the type and intensity of labour needed to construct and maintain structures, and the effect this will have on other farming and income-generating activities. By so doing, the approach has achieved much greater relevance for farmers than the standard 'resource replacement cost' calculation, which gives a value to nutrients lost through erosion equal to the cost of buying chemical replacements. This latter method, though the most widely practised, tends to give a much higher economic value to nutrients than that held by farmers, and they in turn are reluctant to invest in what they see as overly expensive nutrient-restoring activities.
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The frameworks have now been trialled with farmers and extension staff in other countries. In Bolivia, one extension officer commented that until working through the cost-benefit calculation, he had never realised just how costly many of the current conservation recommendations were for small farmers. On the other hand, he noted that simple vegetative techniques and use of stone boundary walls were shown to be profitable to most households. In Nepal, the new assessment tools have already been successfully used by two NGOs in the west of the country. One outcome from the work has been an improved system for storing and using animal manure, to maximise nutrient gains in the field. But Michael Stocking, co-author of 'Handbook for the Field Assessment of Land Degradation', and in charge of the project in the UK, is keen to stress that the focus is to offer a framework for decision-making more than provide specific solutions. The project also aims to foster some new skills in field staff. Modesty and empathy are two particular 'skills' that Stocking suggests are frequently lacking, due in part to the traditional training ethos - taken from the West - which tends to place the expertise of the trained officer above the perceptions and priorities of the 'client'. Working with farmers, and understanding their priorities and constraints, should, he hopes, be a first step in developing successful solutions to hill-farm land degradation.
