Guwahati, Mar 31 : Traditional land clearing for planting of hill rice and vegetables (jhum) in Northeast India is now a part-time job.
Looking at the extent of burning on the hillsides, jhum has gone beyond its sustainability as a way of life. There are too many people practicing it with too little land for a 15-year cycle.
And this means that people can no longer simply live off the land in order to survive, send children to school, and meet the basic needs. They now need some level of government employment as some sort of “multi-cropping”1 to augment their income needs.
Of course for those families that don’t have one member employed at a basic level by government, it is a different story. Half the year is spent first clearing the land and burning just before the rains, then planting and guarding until the harvest of rice. For the other half of the year, they will wait or look for other work on a construction site or labor elsewhere.
The hills are burning today as people expect rain in early March. For two months there has been no rain at all and that is unusual. The first flush of leaves on the tea farms in Assam will be lost if rain does not come in a week, and also much of the ash from the burnings will have blown away.
The burning is extensive, and fires go way beyond the area to be planted in a season. In a nearby village, part of a tea farm burned along by the road and a transformer close to the scrub also burned. Often, a catchment area for water gets burned and in the last few days someone’s house also got caught up in the fires.
Marginal trees get sapped of their life when they could have been a source of production. Bananas are scorched and people have to wait for a new sucker to emerge. When the hillsides burn, much of the nutrient goes up in smoke and the ash gets blown away. When the rain comes, it often carries off any ash left on the surface.
[ via ESSC News ]
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