Can you cut 1 Tonne of carbon pollution out of your life?
Take the challenge70% of farmers in Nagaland are women. They are empowered by their fight against climate change.
On the north-eastern edge of India, bordering Myanmar, is Nagaland – an agricultural oasis encircled by rolling hills and valleys. Here, farming is their economy's primary source of income; however, in this patriarchal region, women do not have land rights.
Shift Cultivation
This Himalayan state is renowned for the unique farming practice of shift cultivation. It involves clearing land for farming until the soil becomes infertile, where the farmers then move on to a different area, allowing the land left behind to rejuvenate itself. Traditionally, each family in a village is allotted a plot of land by the council to farm on for two years before moving on.
But spanning a ten year duration, climate change, misuse of the land, and growing population pressure has alarmingly reduced the shift cultivation cycle from 15-20 years to 5-8 years, threatening the state with an economic crisis. Five to eight years is barely enough time for the previous land to regain its fertility, or even to grow enough food for the family to eat.
Photo: UNDP India
Empowering women through sustainable farming interventions
Funded by the Global Environment Facility, a partnership with the UN Development Program and the Nagaland Government has found a way to both combat this land degradation and empower the women who cultivate these lands. Considering that 70% of the shift farmers in Nagaland are women, the intervention has focussed on empowering women with soil and water conservation practices.
Now, almost 7,000 women have been empowered by adopting integrated farming methods that protect the soil from erosion. Linkages have also been strengthened from the marketplace to the women farmers, where these interventions have increased the women's salaries by up to 25%.
Incredibly, vegetation covers 30,000 more hectares of shift cultivation land across 70 villages, and perhaps most importantly, families can use the land for three years instead of two.
Women with a voice on land use
In 2010, a marketing shed was developed with the help of the UNDP to make it easy for women to sell their produce in Nagaland's province, Mon.
"I was always dependent on my husband for household items, but now because the marketing shed is so close by, I can sell vegetables myself and earn my own income"- Toimai, a regular trader in Mon told the UNDP
Today, local village land use committees have many women as members – something that would be unheard of five years ago. They now have a voice in land use planning and are active in self-help groups of women farmers, set up by the UNDP-Nagaland Government partnership, to spread the word of sustainable land use and continue to equip women of Nagaland with the power to address climate change and food security.
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