Nepal’s Female Farmers Fear Climate Change
-
When Arati Chaudhary’s husband left for India to find work as a migrant
labourer, the job of managing farm and family fell on her slender
shoulders.
Nepal is among the world's most climate vulnerable countries
“My family (of four children) will starve if I don’t work harder on
the farms this year. I just hope that it rains well in the monsoon
season (June-September),” Arati tells IPS in her village of Lamahi in
the remote Dang district, 500 km west of Kathmandu.
Agricultural experts believe that failing agriculture in the western
hills is exacerbating an existing trend of male migration to
neighbouring India – a country that allows Nepali nationals free access
and the right to work there.
“The quality of soil has gone down, there is extreme water shortage
and frequent disasters like landslides, pests and crop diseases have
reduced cultivable acreage,” Krishna Raj Aryal from Support Activities
for Poor Producers of Nepal, a non-governmental organisation (NGO), told
IPS.
While Nepal has largely recovered from the severe 2008-2009 drought,
the worst in 40 years, a World Food Programme (of the United Nations)
bulletin released in February said 3.33 million people in the country
were still suffering from acute food insecurity.
The same bulletin warned that the situation was likely to deteriorate
in Karnali and the far-western hill and mountain districts over the
first quarter of the year with food stocks depleting.
According to the state-run Nepal Agricultural Research
Centre, agricultural production only meets the country’s requirements
for three to eight months per year.
As food insecurity grows, more Nepali families are becoming dependent
on their male members finding alternate livelihoods in India rather
than stick with uncertain farming. This is particularly true of the
impoverished far western districts.
With over 80 percent of Nepal’s 27 million people dependent on
farming, the export of male labour means that the burden of dealing with
climate change falls squarely on the women.
Arati understands that rain has been erratic over Nepal over the last
few years but, being illiterate, she is not quite sure what the
constant talk of global climate change is all about.
“The weather has always been hard to predict, though the monsoon
rains have become noticeably scantier and more erratic,” she said.
Arati’s situation of being left to her own devices to cope with the
vagaries of the weather is no different from that of thousands of
female-headed farming households in the western region.
NGO leaders like Aryal worry that, in spite of the talk in the cities
about climate change, little is being done to educate rural women on
how to adapt to changing weather patterns or provide tangible support.
Government officials deny that the issue is being neglected and say
things will improve gradually in a country that is still finding its
feet after a debilitating ten-year civil war that ended with the
abolition of the monarchy in 2008.
Nepal is yet to give itself a new constitution that is acceptable to
all parties and ethnic groups. On May 27, Prime Minister Baburam
Bhattarai announced that parliament, elected in 2008 to write the
constitution, would be disbanded and elections held in November.
“Adaptation programmes need careful planning and we are seriously
working on minimising the impacts of climate change,” Deependra Bhadaur
Kshetri, vice-chairman of the National Planning Commission, told IPS.
The country’s National Adaptation Plan of Action is still under
process. Separately, the environment ministry is preparing a gender
strategy that is expected to address the problems faced by female-headed
households dependent on agriculture.
Nepal is placed among the most climate vulnerable countries in the
world due to its extreme geography (climbing from 60 m to over 8,800 m
above sea level) and its impoverished, natural resource dependent
population.
A 2007 study on the impact of climate change in Rasuwa
district by Resource Identification and Management Society (RIMS), an
environmental NGO, found steady increases in temperatures in the summer
and monsoon seasons between 1978 and 2007.
Analysing data for that period, RIMS found that in addition to the
temperature rise the average annual rainfall had dropped by about one mm
a year, with implications for agriculture in the region.
Nepal’s agriculture sector is greatly dependent on timely rainfall
(only 17 percent of land is irrigated), making farming highly vulnerable
to variations in rainfall patterns.
Almost 80 percent of Nepal’s annual rainfall occurs within the
monsoon months of June to September when Nepal is flooded with rain
while facing scarcity or drought in the other eight months of the year.
“There is little knowledge on climate change in the rural areas and
we need to educate people, especially women, on what is happening,” says
Gehendra Gurung, head of the disaster risk reduction and climate change
programme at Practical Action, an international NGO.
Gurung says women in the remote areas are seriously disadvantaged
because of low literacy rates and lack of access to information.
Compared to 75 percent literacy rate among Nepali males, the female
literacy rate is only 54 percent.
The last labour force survey carried out by the government and
released in 2008 showed a rise in female-headed households from 14
percent to 22 percent over a decade. Experts believe that even more
women are now heading households.
“The impact on the livelihoods of women is direct since, apart from
household work, they are more involved in farming and livestock keeping
than ever before,” says climate change expert with Practical Action,
Dinanath Bhandari.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (of the United
Nations), countries such as Nepal, India and Bangladesh have about 60
percent of the female workforce engaged in agriculture.
In Nepal, the gender divide is pronounced with women involved in
agricultural, pastoral, wage labour and household work, according to the
2011 U.N. Environment Programme report, ‘Women at the frontline of
climate change – gender risks and hopes.’
Women in Nepal’s mountain regions carry out over 6.6 times the
agricultural work than men, according to the Kathmandu-based
International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development.
Women are also more dependent on natural resources since they are
charged with the responsibility of securing water, food and fuel for
cooking and heating in rural Nepal.
“Overall there has been little focus on the gender component and this needs to be recognised first of all,” says Bhandari.
Practical Action runs an adaptation programme where farmers have
replaced their rice farms with banana plantations, which are less
vulnerable to the vagaries of the weather.
“Ultimately it is the government that should take the call on running
adaptation and mitigation programmes,” says Gurung. “The voluntary
sector is limited to pilot and demonstration projects.”
Some NGOs are already implementing adaptation projects involving
large numbers of women. For example, a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) project
is engaged in improving agricultural production in the mountainous
district of Langtang.
Here some about 100 women are involved in promoting local seed
varieties and discouraging farmers from taking to hybrids which are not
viable in the long term due to the constant climate change.
“We have engaged these women to run the project and train local
people in adapting to extreme climatic conditions,” said Anil Manandhar,
country chief of WWF-Nepal.
The women collect and preserve local seed varieties and sell them to
female farmers at subsidised rates. In addition, WWF-Nepal runs a
Krishak Pathsala (Farmers’ School), where irrigation and water
conservation methods are taught.
“It is important that women are directly engaged in climate change
projects because they are now more involved than ever before in farming
and are the real victims of climate change,” said Manandhar.
* This article is one of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network.
No comments:
Post a Comment