SHILLONG, Oct 22: The North East Slow Food and Agrobiodiversity Society (NESFAS) has expressed discontent after learning that Shillong MP Vincent H Pala is mooting to raise impacts of jhum cultivation and other issues during the parliamentary meeting at the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), while reasoning that “jhum-based food system is highly resilient to climate change”.
In a bid to support its statement, the NESFAS recalled a publication titled ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Food Systems: Insights on sustainability and resilience from the front line of climate change’, which was the result of a collaboration between United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) along with several universities, research centres and local indigenous people’s organisations (which includes NESFAS). The publication, it said, had received the 2021 World Sustainability Report Award.
The book has the case study of the food system in Nongtraw, East Khasi Hills, which is based on jhum cultivation.
The study found that based on the methodology adopted for assessing resilience to climate change, the food system in Nongtraw was found to be resilient in 10 out of the 13 indicators, the NESFAS said.
The NESFAS added that it had recently conducted a Household Food Insecurity Access Scale Survey (FHIAS) in 18 villages of Meghalaya and Nagaland, whose food system is based on shifting cultivation.
Moderate and severe food insecurity was found to be only 11%, while the corresponding number for South Asia was 43%. This highlighted the confirmed resilience of jhum-based food system this time against the shocks created by COVID-19 pandemic, it said. “Jhum-based food system is resilient to both natural and human stress, making it crucial for food security and sustainability,” the NESFAS said.
It was also pointed out that the importance of jhum cultivation for food security and sustainability was in fact also mentioned in the 2018 NITI Aayog’s ‘Report of Working Group III Shifting Cultivation: Towards a Transformational Approach’.
“Some of the main policy-level suggestions made in the aforementioned report are garnering authentic data on jhum; improved land use planning; amend credit guidelines to allow jhum cultivators access financial resources; and most importantly categorise jhum ‘…as distinct land use, recognizing that it is both an agricultural and forest management practice conducted on the same plot of land but at sequentially separated times’,” the NESFAS said, adding that the “last point is very important as it shifts the debate from jhum destroying forests to actually being very valuable to ecosystem services because of its landscape management approach. In fact the report mentions that drying of water sources, decline in soil fertility, reduced availability of fuel wood, fodder and wild edibles are the outcome of replacement of jhum by agricultural intensification”.
The fallows under jhum in fact should be categorised, the report states, as ‘regenerating fallows’ which in time will become secondary forests and add to the forest cover of an area, according to NESFAS.
The 2018 NITI Ayog report also mentions that in order to manage jhum, government schemes have mostly prioritised cereal and plantation crops, causing a reduction in diversity of crops. This, according to NESFAS, has severely limited availability of food crops and compromised food availability during the gestation periods, leading to food insecurity.
A research done by NESFAS has found that there is an average of 200 food plants from a single village in Meghalaya and Nagaland, half of which in many villages can come from jhum, “which are again climate-resilient and micro-nutrient species”.
Moreover, it stated that NESFAS chairperson, Phrang Roy, has been invited to speak in the COP26 sessions, wherein he will talk on the issue of supporting the Indigenous Food System which includes shifting cultivation for combating climate change.
Stating that the findings by NESFAS has strengthened UN’s commitment to shifting cultivation, the society said that the FAO is contemplating giving a small grant to NESFAS for a nature-based restoration pilot initiative in five villages, which will include bolstering the fire management system found in shifting cultivation.