Introduction

Crop-livestock mixed settled farming, the primary occupation of the local people in the central and western Himalaya, is dependent on forests to provide most of the livestock feed and forest leaf litter that is mixed with livestock excreta for use as manure (Ives and Messerli 1989). Agricultural expansion at the cost of forest cover is widespread (Singh et al 1984; Rai et al 1994; Ramakrishnan et al 1994; Thapa and Weber 1995; Schweik et al 1997). However, there are reports of tree cover improvement in the recent decades in a few villages (Gilmour and Nurse 1991; Fox 1993). Agriculture-forest-rural economy linkages have not been as comprehensively analyzed as the spatial extent of land use/cover changes. The aim of the present study was to analyze the patterns, causes, and ecological and socioeconomic implications of land use/cover changes during the 1963–1993 period in Pranmati Watershed in the Indian Himalaya.

Study area

Pranmati Watershed (30°5′–30°13′N and 79°29′–79°37′E), a segment of the upper Gangetic catchment, is located in Chamoli District and covers an area of 94 km². The altitude varies from 1100 to 4070 m (Figure 1). There are 13 settlements, largely confined to the area up to 2400 m. At 1600 m, the average annual rainfall is 1700 mm, and the mean monthly maximum and minimum temperatures are 25 and 11°C, respectively. The temperature decreases by about 1°C with a 180 m increase in altitude, but the area is uniform with respect to rainfall regime. Schists and gneisses dominate the parent material.

In the late 19th century, land rights were granted to farmers on cultivated terraced slopes, whereas all uncultivated lands (including alpine meadows) were registered as government reserve and protected forests. Local people were allowed to use nontimber forest resources, but the government decided on the level of use. In the 1930s, 18.5% of the forest area was classified as Village Panchayat (community forests), and the power to regulate the use of resources needed for subsistence within these forests was transferred to local institutions known as Van Panchayat (forest councils). Forest councils can impose a maximum fine of Rs 50 for violation of the rules they set. Councils need approval from the government for commercial extraction of nontimber forest resources. Agriculture and commercial timber extraction are banned on all forested lands (Rao and Saxena 1996).

Methodology

Results

Discussion

The rate of agricultural expansion observed in Pranmati Watershed (0.14% of watershed area/year) was significantly lower than the rates (0.21–1.62% of watershed area/year) observed in other Himalayan watersheds (Virgo and Subba 1994; Thapa and Weber 1995; Schweik et al 1997). Such comparisons, however, should be viewed in light of variation in the spatiotemporal scale of change analysis, mapping methodology, and ecological, socioeconomic, and policy factors influencing land use dynamics. Though all agricultural land use on forestland is illicit in the Indian Himalaya, the degree of enforcement of this policy varies. Reserve forests were not much encroached upon because they were easily accessible and frequently visited by government officials for pine resin extraction prescribed in a government working plan. Encroachment is more frequent in community and protected forests because these forests are highly inaccessible and also excluded from government working plans. Forest councils are unable to check encroachments within community forests because of several reasons:

Unlike some other mountain areas where policies forced or promoted cash crops (Ives and He 1996; Preston 1998; Renaud et al 1998), expansion of cash crops, potatoes, and amaranth in Pranmati Watershed seems to be an indigenous initiative driven by a sociocultural change from a subsistence to a market economy (Bjonness 1983; Nusser and Clemens 1996), the comparative ecological and economic advantages of these crops, changing food habits, and the policy of supplying food grains at subsidized prices since the 1970s (Maikhuri et al 1996). Confinement of agricultural expansion to higher altitudes (1850–2600 m) is partly because climatic conditions here are more favorable for potato and amaranth. Farmers gained substantial economic benefits by expanding cash crops, although this was done at the expense of many traditional crops and cultivars. The latter development implies that options for coping with the risks of market failure and suspension of subsidized food grain supplies were foregone.

Differing from the trend observed in Pranmati Watershed, the change from a subsistence to a market economy progressed without any significant loss of crop diversity in Chhakinal Watershed (District Kullu, Himachal Pradesh). Farmers here switched from monocropping of traditional crops with poor economic potential to mixed cropping on small plots, rather than abandoning the crops altogether (Singh et al 1997). Bhotiya farmers, a transhumant tribal community in the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve (Uttar Pradesh, Himalaya), began cultivation of many costly medicinal plants that used to be harvested from the wild, thus generating income without any significant loss of food crop diversity (Maikhuri et al 2000).

Increase in livestock population coupled with changes in composition of livestock holdings is a common trend, but the causes and magnitude of these changes vary (Sharma and Shaw 1993; Mishra 1997). In Pranmati Watershed, a change from the traditional joint families to nuclear families was accompanied by the persistence of traditions of sufficiency at the household level. These included maintaining cattle required for plowing and regarding sheep-goat-mule husbandry primarily as the occupation of lower caste groups. This appears to have contributed to a higher rate of increase in the cattle population. We were able to estimate the area under open and dense forest only for the 1993 period (open and dense forests were merged as 1 class in the 1963 data source). However, local people mentioned conversion from dense to open forest in many locations visited to check the accuracy of land use/cover interpreted from satellite imagery. Conversion of dense to open forests could be attributed to an increase in grazing-lopping pressure (Figure 2) as a result of agricultural expansion to forestland, increase in livestock population, decline in fodder production on farmland, and increase in the amount of litter removed from the forest floor in order to produce larger quantities of manure required for cash crops (Figure 3). The disturbance caused by whole tree cutting for timber, leading to conversion from dense to open forest, was rare in the study area (Saxena et al 1994).

Changes such as complete abandonment or long-term fallowing of agricultural land, use of chemical fertilizers at subsidized prices, and plantation of fodder trees on farmland have been observed as responses to the scarcity of manure and livestock feed (Gilmour and Nurse 1991; Maikhuri et al 1995; Rao and Saxena 1996; Schweik et al 1997; Nautiyal et al 1998). The absence of such changes in Pranmati Watershed suggests that farmers do not yet see manure and fodder as factors limiting farm productivity. However, the trends of agricultural expansion, increase in livestock population, decline in fodder production on farmland, and increase in manure input to sustain cash crops imply forest biodiversity and ecosystem function losses that might be difficult to recover in totality in the fragile Himalayan landscape (Rao et al 1999). As crop and livestock productivity is sustained with inputs derived from forests, continued depletion of forest resources in the long run will result in poor returns from agriculture, the backbone of the rural economy. Research and policy support for improvement in traditional soil fertility management practices and forest resource-based economic development opportunities for local people are needed to reduce threats from agriculture to forest ecosystems.