Shifting Cultivation: A Complex System of Farming

[Himani]

Shifting cultivation is a widespread and primitive forest-based farming system and common practice of agriculture in Nagaland that provide food security to a large portion of the population.

Shifting cultivation seems very simplistic from outer angle but when one goes into deeper it’s a very complex in nature where traditional systems, livelihood, the conservation agenda all are very much interlinked with each other. Shifting cultivators have an intricate relationship with the land and have a strong affinity and respect towards the land as it is a way of life. Women also play a key role in Indigenous Peoples’ sustainable resource management and in maintaining food security. The indigenous women perform most of the work related to shifting cultivation. They are responsible for the selection of seeds, for weeding the fields, gathering, processing, and selling the surplus products. Men do the identification of land suitable for shifting cultivation and the hard physical work in land preparation. The land governance system is very complex in North east. Here, village has a self-contained traditional institution which handles the administration of the judicial matters called Village Council. The Council is composed of village elders, which is the supreme authority in the village. The council functions under the guidance of a chairman who is elected by the members among themselves. The governance system of the Village council differs among the tribes in Nagaland. Some tribes follow the governing system of Chieftainship where the Village Chief, who would be the one to start the village is the head of the village (in the case of Sumi tribe), while in other cases, the Village council follows a more Democratic form of body where elected members are appointed by the community ( eg.: Putu menden in the case of Aos). Further in the case of a traditional Angami system of governance, the village elders are sought out for being advisors of all village level decision making.

Despite of multiple benefits of the complex system shifting cultivation is often described as “traditional”, inflexible and outdated, in contrast with “modern”, mechanised and chemical agriculture. If we see modern agriculture system after the green revaluation which focuses on higher agriculture productivity from hybrid variety of crops which required more water, fertilizers and nutrients and give higher production in a controlled environment and this is one of the reason of loss of many indigenous varieties as now focus is only on productivity or high yielding crops and hence our agro-biodiversity is reducing over time. In contrary, shifting cultivation promotes verities of crops in its natural environment and help to conserve varies of indigenous crop in the natural environmental conditions and help to maintain and conserve the gene pool of various indigenous crop verities and make communities more resilience due to other external factors. During this COVID pandemic it has been observed that North-eastern people has less affected from COVID-19.

So there is a need to understand this complex system more carefully. Research is to be undertaken to understand the socio-ecomonic context along with changes in forest cover, crop diversity and food security including soil fertility regeneration, fallow management etc in shifting cultivation areas.

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