Biodiversity is the foundation of the sustainability of life and the living planet. Diversity in livelihoods is the basis of socioeconomic sustainability. Agriculture is the basis of human survival, existence, material progress, happiness, and sustainable future. With systematic erosion of its biodiversity (i.e., agrobiodiversity), agriculture, however, has assumed a high degree of unsustainability. Agriculture-based livelihoods have lost their diversities, a phenomenon that has pushed this vital livelihood system towards a state of unsustainability.
Despite these basic indicators of unsustainability – that is, reduced agrobiodiversity and livelihood diversity – as witnessed in mainstream agriculture, mountain agriculture still enjoys a relatively high degree of agrobiodiversity and livelihood diversity. Mountain agriculture is still a farming-system based entity. Forests, cultivated land, livestock, and households integrate into a farming system. A forest-supported agricultural system involving an extreme degree of biodiversity in natural forests, food crops, and livestock naturally enjoys a high degree of sustainability. Diverse scenarios of land-based livelihoods prevail in response to mountains’ natural heterogeneity (topographic diversity, biodiversity, ecological niches, microclimatic diversity, etc.), and horticulture-, livestock-, food grain-, seed production-, and forest-based livelihoods.
Forests prevailing on common land in Uttarakhand, as also in other Himalayan mountain areas, constitute the core of the farming systems. Livestock play a vital role by making a living bridge between the ecologically more stable forest ecosystem and ecologically more vulnerable cultivated land through which nutrients from the forest land flow into the cultivated land via manure. This relationship contributes to maintaining soil fertility vital for sustainable food production from the cultivated area. The soil fertility is further ameliorated through nutrient cycling maintained through livestock (feeding on crop residues and nutrients returning to soil through manure). Cattle bullocks are used for agricultural operations, like ploughing, levelling, puddling, inter-culture, etc. Thus, such a farming system operating in the mountain areas uses (or tends to use) no external inputs. Animate energy emanating from human and livestock muscle power is the only energy source propelling the agriculture-based economy of the mountains. Seed exchange among farmers amid the traditional mountain “agri” culture is a lifeline of agriculture. This self-containment feature of agriculture is essential for keeping the farmers away from dependence on the market and the debt trap that often drive small and marginal farmers toward suicide in Green Revolution areas.
Agriculture in the plains of the Uttarakhand-Terai region is altogether distinguishable from that of the mountain region. It is one of the most successful stories of the Green Revolution in India ever since its inception in the latter half of the 1960s. This mainstream agriculture relies on monocultures of the so-called high-yielding varieties (HYVs), excessive irrigation, indiscriminate chemical fertilizers, pesticide sprays, and overwhelming mechanisation. Pantnagar University, eulogised by Nobel Laureate Norman E. Borlaug as the Harbinger of the Green Revolution, has played a pivotal role in transforming agriculture in line with the Green Revolution package in this region. The Green Revolution policy package hardly distinguishes between mountain and plain agriculture except for seed varieties. The Pandora’s Box for mountain agriculture opens the same items and practices as for Tarai agriculture.
Agriculture is still a mainstay of life in Uttarakhand. However, development intervention in agriculture as well as in other sectors is not strictly as per the mountain perspective involving unique specificities of the region, such as constraining attributes (fragility, marginality, and poor accessibility) and favourable attributes (heterogeneity, ecological niches, and people’s adaptation mechanisms). Agriculture is not just about technology; it is an ecological process driven by photosynthesis that the food-providing plants in the human-modified ecosystems participate in. A healthy ecosystems ensures sustainable food production and food security. Agriculture, in essence, is about agro-eco-philosophy evolved over millennia by farmers through trials and errors using what we call traditional ecological wisdom.
Breaking down of ecological integrity in the fragile Himalayan mountains is leading to agriculture disasters even in the far-flung plain areas beyond the Himalayan-Terai region due to high land-low land ecological linkages. In the Terai area, most of the artisan wells have gone dry and the rest are in the process of vanishing. Agricultural practices overlooking ecological realities – as is the case of modern agriculture – together with ecological disasters in the Himalayan mountains gradually precipitating into adverse climate change are giving way to reap hunger, malnutrition, poverty, and an insecure future.
One of the most neglected aspects of conventional agriculture is an unabated neglect of nature’s pollinators, which are so vital for maintaining ecological integrity and the production potential of agroecosystems. Our modern agriculture must be accused of wiping out insect biodiversity by employing a variety of pesticides as ‘chemical weapons’. Among the insects are the beautiful butterflies which are also being driven toward the pathways to extinction carved out by the Green Revolution agriculture.
Among the most critical pollinators are the honeybees which are fast vanishing from cultivated lands simply because they don’t have the plant species they could prosper on. How much do we depend on honeybees’ role in our food production? Nearly one-third of everything we eat is owing to pollination enacted by honeybees. Of the 264 crop species, 84 are pollinated by animals and as many as 4,000 vegetable varieties in Europe exist on account of pollination by bees, according to FAO.
The trend of overemphasis on the cultivation of cereals that require no insect-pollination, many insect varieties have been lost forever. The saturation of crop fields with pesticide sprays is another big reason for the bee populations to shrink to a formidable extent. Though mountain agriculture is not as threatened by pesticides as the mainstream tarai or plain agriculture, many butterfly species have already vanished. Three zoologists from Punjabi University, Deepika Mehra, Jagbir Singh Kirit, and Avatar Kaur Sidhu, in their study, found as many as 493 butterfly species, including 29 as endemic, in various habitats in the Indian Western Himalayas, Uttarakhand included. This makes up about 30% of the total butterfly fauna in India. Butterflies are highly habitat-specific. In the Western Himalayas, the butterflies are generally categorised into two ecological groups, viz., forest species and hypsobionts. The former types of butterflies are confined to dense forest habitats, and the latter types prevail above timberline, in alpine climates.
Butterfly-specific habitats are also necessary for their migratory routes. Many butterfly species prevailing within a narrow range of habitats are specially threatened. Cultivated lands, especially those devoid of the plant species giving refuge for butterflies for their foods (such as pollen grains) and breeding, are not conducive to butterfly conservation. Being extremely eco-sensitive, butterflies are also very prone to extinction. While forest-centred agriculture still existing in some remote mountain areas can help conserve butterflies and other vital pollinators, the Green Revolution type agriculture with no room for forests and nature’s biodiversity is constantly pushing the butterflies on way to their extinction. “Some of the most cherished species of all – butterflies – show signs of a significant population decline,” records Encyclopaedia Britannica. The Xerces blue butterfly was the first insect to go extinct due to human activities in the USA in the 1940s and now several seem to meet the same fate. In the Anthropocene, agriculture is the dominant factor fuelling the processes leading to the Sixth Mass Extinction.
Insects are critical to any ecosystem; the extinction of any species inevitably has a ripple effect through the community it belongs to. Due to the expansion of cultivated areas at the cost of nature’s wilderness flowering in the forests, species in large numbers in natural habitats have come under stress with many being threatened by extinction.
Singh is Professor Emeritus, Department of Environmental Science, GB Pant University of Agriculture and Technology.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author's and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK.