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Post-disaster agricultural transitions in Nepal

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Abstract

In Spring 2015, a series of earthquakes and aftershocks struck Nepal. The earthquakes caused significant changes in labor and land availability, cash income needs, and land quality. We examine how these post-earthquake impacts converged with ongoing agricultural shifts. Earthquake-related socio-economic and landscape changes specifically motivate the adoption of cardamom, Amomum subulatum, a high-value ecologically beneficial, and low labor commercial crop. We investigate reasons for the increased interest in cardamom post-earthquake, and challenges associated with it. We find that adopting cardamom serves as an important post-disaster adaptation. However, more broadly, unevenly distributed interventions coupled with the high capital costs of agricultural transition exacerbate social differentiation in communities after the disaster. Adoption is often limited to economically better off smallholder farmers. This paper extends previous research on disasters and smallholder farming by highlighting the specific potential of disasters to accelerate agricultural transitions and resulting inequality from the changes.

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Notes

  1. Of 79 households surveyed in Boch and Sundrawati (Epstein et al. in press).

  2. In September 2015, after Nepal’s new constitution was announced, India imposed an ‘unofficial’ or ‘undeclared’ transport blockade. The Indian government claimed that they were not intentionally restricting transportation, rather that Madhesdhi protests at the border prohibited safe movement of goods into Nepal. India supplies nearly all of Nepal’s oil and gas, and this two-month blockade limited their flow into Nepal, resulting in a widespread fuel crisis. This shortage reverberated across the economy, severely impacting sectors from agriculture and disaster relief to tourism and pharmaceuticals.

  3. Central, paved thoroughfare that runs east–west across Dolakha District; the main district road for transport of goods.

Abbreviations

VDC:

Village Development Committee

DADO:

District Agricultural Development Office

MoA:

Ministry of Agriculture

UN:

United Nations

HVC:

High-value crop

TFRDC:

Tropical Fruits Rootstock Development Center

Terai :

Lowland plains

Masl:

Meters above sea level

Amomum subulatum :

(Latin) Black cardamom, also known as Nepal cardamom

Alnus nepalensis :

(Latin) Nepalese alder; utis in Nepali

Khet :

(Nepali) Irrigated fields; typically used to cultivate rice and wheat

Bari :

(Nepali) Rainfed fields; typically used to cultivate maize and millet

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Acknowledgements

We heartily thank the participants from Charikot, Sundrawati and Boch in Dolakha District, Nepal, for spending time with the research team and contributing to this study. We thank collaborators at ForestAction Nepal: Bikash Adhikari, Govinda Paudel, Naya Sharma Paudel and Dil Bahadur Khatri, for their fieldwork assistance. We thank Isha Ray, Emily Yeh, Sarah Turner, Kripa Jagannathan, Veronica Jacome, Galen Murton, Rupak Shresta and Dinesh Paudel for their review, generous comments and guidance, and Michael MacDonald for the study location map. Funding and support was provided by the American Alpine Club, the Peder Sather Fellowship, a joint collaborative of the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Bergen, and ©Patagonia.

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Correspondence to Jessica DiCarlo.

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DiCarlo, J., Epstein, K., Marsh, R. et al. Post-disaster agricultural transitions in Nepal. Ambio 47, 794–805 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-018-1021-3

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