Introduction:

Shifting cultivation or jhumming is a widely practiced system of crop cultivation among the indigenous communities of India. The practice, also known as slash-and-burn agriculture, is when farmers clear land by slashing vegetation and burning forests and woodlands to create clear land for agricultural purposes. This provides very easy and very fast method of the preparation of the land for the agriculture. The bush and the weeds can be removed easily. The burning of waste materials provides needed nutrients for the cultivation. It gives a family its food, fodder, fuel, livelihood and is closely linked to their identity.

The government is reported to be formulating a new policy that would lend legal recognition to shifting cultivation as a form of agroforestry to enable nomadic farmers get bank credit and agriculture-related subsidies.

Body:

The National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog, which had mooted the idea of redefining jhumming land-use as agroforestry in a report in 2018, has its own logic for doing so. It is based on the contention that shifting farming is essentially a method of putting land to two distinct uses alternately — agriculture, when it is under cultivation, and fallow forestry, when it is left untilled for revival of forest.

While the objective of this move is good, as it is unfair to deny government sops to those engaged in this age-old farm practice, its consequences are likely to be disastrous.

Challenges posed by shifting cultivation:

• This mode of farming, once fairly common in many parts of the world, has gradually given way to settled agriculture to stave off its ill-effects on ecology, biodiversity, habitats and other natural features.
• It also causes loss or deterioration of forest cover leading to soil erosion and degradation of catchments of rivers and other water bodies.
• There can be the heavy erosion of the soil is getting affected and by this, the revers that are in the plain and low lying areas like the Brahmaputra and Barak get flooded in the time of the heavy rainfall.
• By shifting cultivation, there is a loss of 22 percent of the soil that is on the top of the soil and full of fertility. This creates a serious problem in the economic rate of peoples. In this, there is the rendered permanent land in the shifting cultivation.
• In India, this pernicious practice is still in vogue on an estimated 1.73 million hectares, largely in the ecologically fragile hilly terrains in the Northeast. The other states where this primitive system of agriculture still persists in some pockets are Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Madhya Pradesh.

Concerns associated with the new policy:

• Increasing pressure on land resources:
  • with growing population pressure on land, the time given for renewal of forests — just three to four years — is usually insufficient for that purpose.
  • This phase used to be as long as 10 to 40 years in the past. The green cover now rarely comes up to the level where it can be deemed as secondary forest.

• Poorly maintained land records:
  • There is a lack of updated and authentic data on the area under shifting cultivation as well as the total number of households practicing shifting cultivation.
  • While different programmes designed to address the management of shifting cultivation have claimed drastic reductions, the Forest Survey of India’s (FSI, 2015) reports over the years continue to attribute large scale deforestation and loss of forest cover in NE India to shifting cultivation. 

• Inaccessibility of credit:
  • The farmers engaged in jhumming wanted opportunities for higher income from farming and non-farm employment, education and medical facilities and other civic amenities apart from access to government schemes, which they are unduly denied in the absence of land titles (pattas) in their name.
  • They also do not get many of the benefits provided under the Forest Rights Act. At present, they are treated neither as farmers nor as forest dwellers.

• Plight of the farmers:
  • The farmers engaged in jhumming (jhumias) are themselves fed up with this kind of nomadic life. They want to move beyond subsistence farming to take up market-linked agriculture.
  • A recent study conducted by the Mizoram University’s School of Earth Sciences bears this out. As many as 95 per cent of the respondents felt that jhumming was economically unviable.

Way forward:

• A viable policy to curb shifting agriculture, is that if financial assistance is made available for terracing the hill slopes where jhumming is practised now, the jhumias would gladly shift to permanent farming.
• This, indeed, is not a tall order and should be complied with to put an end to the socio-ecological curse that shifting farming has virtually turned into.
• State agencies like agricultural marketing, forest development corporations of concerned states should take steps to formalize, promote and organize marketing of products from shifting cultivation.
• There is an urgent need to update data on the area under shifting cultivation as well as the total population still involved with the practice.
• There is need to blend traditional knowledge on resource use and management with modern scientific approaches.
• Managing transformations in shifting cultivation areas is fundamental to agricultural development in the uplands of northeast (NE) India and an important element of the Act East Policy.