Of Rabbits, Hillmen and Muddy Rivers

Since the early 1970s, shrill alarms have been sounded that because of deforestation Nepal is in danger of being washed away into the Bay of Bengal. Indeed, as one approaches the Bengali coastline when flying from Bangkok or Singapore, grey, turbid plumes of silt can be seen reaching out into the sea. Closer to home, the holy Ganga and her Nepali tributaries are not sparkling blue and pure, but resemble mudflow in their colour. Before the plane lands at Kathmandu’s Gauchar airport, Royal Nepal’s Boeing skims past the valley’s rim to show mountains, stripped bare of forests.

It would seem that there is every reason to believe the prevailing deforestation syllogism, which runs thus: all poor marginal farmers cut trees for fodder and fuel; marginal farmers breed like irresponsible rabbits; because there are more of them, these farmers have to cut more trees on higher, steeper slopes; this results in deforestation, soil erosion and, eventually, apocalypse in Bangladesh.

However, the reasoning is flawed on several counts, not the least because it blames the victims. The hill farmer knows his own needs and the productive capabilities and environmental limitations of his terraces, better than the urban theorist who does not have a life-or-death commitment to the land. If the farmer does cut more trees than is ecologically sound, it is probably because of some other dynamic, such as, irresponsible forest nationalisation, or unfair land tenure practices.

No hill farmer is so irrational as to cut down his own survival base. In fact, there is universal acceptance in the hill villages that you cannot keep cattle if you don’t have access to fodder and litter form the forests, and you cannot farm for very long if your fields do not get resulting fertiliser from the animal wastes. If the careful, traditional husbanding of scarce hill forest resources has broken down, replaced by the rapacious mining of forests, the culprits can probably be found in market forces that encourage it, political forces that nationalise resources and exclude those without organised clout, and the non-sustainable, energy intensive value system, peddled by the industrial world.

As for the “rabbit theory,” it simply states that the root of all underdevelopment is helpless over breeding. Yet, the very premise of this theory is the questionable 1981 Nepali census. Entire villages in the mid-hills were counted from the roadside chautara, based on the report of the first passing porter. And what can you say of 12-year-old census takers, who were paid 25 paisa per survey sheet? These 12-year-old counters, along with village politicians, population experts and aid agency officials, have a stake in seeing a high population figure, and they have carried it to this day.

At the same time, the fecundity of the hill mothers should be the last to be blamed. How can the hill household survive as a three member nuclear family? The daily survival routine requires them to fetch water (2-3 hours), fetch fuel (2-4 hours), cook (4 hours), farm (full time), tend to cattle (almost full time), tend to young children (overtime) and earn a salary, do wickerwork or do trade where possible (full time).

Furthermore, even if the Nepali population was exploding, the people from the overburdened hills are not moving up-slope. On the contrary, the migration has been down to the urban centers and the tarai plains. The people have been living at critical ecological capacity, long enough for social mechanisms to evolve. These mechanisms include migration and the sequestering of reproduction-age adults, as celibate sadhus and lamas. If there is population pressure, it probably results from a changed social and political milieu, which does not allow those mechanisms to function. For example, modern lifestyles are making the ochre robe less attractive for the young.

Even if one accepts the idea that deforestation is caused by over population, no firm nexus has been established between trees, or their lack, and muddy rivers. Leading watershed authorities maintain that even if all of Nepal was nothing but a canopy of trees, intensive rainfall would still wash a lot away. A study at ICIMOD in Kathmandu by Brian Carson, indicated that suspend silt is, in volume, a very small fraction of the total mass that moves downstream in Himalayan rivers.

Surface erosion, of course, is an insidiously damaging phenomenon for the hill farmer, because it robs the generally poor soil of the fertile top layer that sustains production. But, do trees stop surface erosion? In heavy downpours, such as during the monsoon, the trees do not stop sheet erosion of the topsoil. Instead, it is the lowly and much ignored grass that saves the topsoil. A hill slope below Harnok in Dang Valley has a beautiful forest cover, but trekking through it is like scampering through the Chambal ravines: the forest floor is so heavily grazed that it lacked all grass cover, which resulted in eroded gullies and exposed tree roots. A study by the Nepal Australia Forestry Project concludes in a preliminary assessment that the Himalayan forests do not really help to soak up the intense monsoon downpour, any more, than trampled grassland.

All this, points to an uncomfortable (or unconventional) possibility. That muddy rivers in full spate are quite natural for the Himalaya, but, they could be aggravated by poor management of land.

This polemic should not be viewed as an excuse for doing away with afforestation. Even though badly managed, Nepali hill slopes – whether forest or agricultural or pastoral grazing – are all that the hillmen and women have for their survival. Efforts to make the mountains more habitable through better management of fuel and fodder resources should continue, so that the people of the hills do not have to migrate to the plains. That – not floods – is why we need forests.

~Dipak Gyawali is a resource economist and power engineer, specializing on Nepal’s water resources.