Oped»
Beyond the fence
- (un)common sense
APR 12 -
The killing of two women and a girl in Bardia National Park last month must be yet another gruesome reminder of the deeply-entrenched practice of impunity in our security institutions. Bidhya Bhandari’s callous and shameless defence of the killers aside, this criminal act should not go unpunished if there is to be any semblance of justice in new Nepal.
We should also understand that state violence such as this against people living around the protected areas have been going on for several decades now. Besides the culture of impunity in the security institutions that have become an integral part of protected area management, at the root of this violence lies the quaint conservation credos. Two are particularly powerful among them. First, conservationists assumed that biodiversity including the endangered animals could be protected only if some areas were left in pristine condition by fencing them off from the human population. Second, it was believed that the human managed landscapes such as agricultural lands, pastures and ponds were unimportant as far as biodiversity conservation was concerned.
The specific forms that conservation took in Nepal and elsewhere were solely not the result of these assumptions that international conservation agencies brought with them when they came to implement their visions in countries such as Nepal. The extant political conditions were equally important. Nepal’s royal family, top bureaucrats and the military and business elite found new opportunities for appropriating national resources — this time in the name of conservation. It is an open secret that military officers that are in charge of securing the protected areas have had no problem in hunting animals or cutting down trees for timber for their personal use. The business elite found in conservation new opportunities for making money through tourism. In Nepal, the political, military, business and intellectual elite all have deep ties. It does not take long to find out that a lot of the tourism business in Nepal was also controlled by those in power.
Except in a few places such as the Annapurna region where a sizable section of the local people have benefited from conservation activities, in most other places the locals and among them the most marginalised have become the biggest victims — this despite the fact that most of them have the biggest stake in conservation. The elite came to grab their land cheap. The business opportunities that emerged around tourism went to those who were already powerful.
I worked with fishing communities living along the banks of the Narayani River for three years in the mid-1990s. Majhis, Mushahars and Botes had been fishing in the Narayani River for over a century. Working with them to build their organisation, many of my colleagues and I realised that there had been a phenomenal decline in the fish in the Narayani River during the last several decades. What was so remarkable about the decline was that the fishing people knew the broad timelines of these declines, and these timelines directly correlated with Nepal’s tryst with bikas.
Nehruvian India went on a dam building frenzy after independence. By now, there is not a single river in most of South Asia that runs unimpeded into the Indian Ocean. These dams have produced dubious results. Beyond the initial bumper crops, most of the lands that these dams were to serve have faced various levels of salinisation and water logging. Fish in the water bodies across Nepal have plummeted.
Until I worked with these fishing communities, I had no idea that the building of the Gandak Dam had had a dramatic impact on the fish population. Many species of fish used to travel over thousands of kilometres upstream to spawn. Dams everywhere blocked these movements. I still remember one evening sitting on the river bank with several fishing people and listing the species of fish that had by then become extinct. Within less than five minutes, many in the village along the bank of the Narayani listed 25 different types of fish that had gone extinct during their lifetime.
The decline in the number of fish species went hand in hand with the decline in the volume of fish. Many shared with deep nostalgia how they used to catch as much fish in an hour as they were catching today during a whole day’s fishing. The size of the fish had also declined. They were catching smaller and smaller fish.
I am sure dams were not the only culprits. The building of dams across the Kosi and the Gandak also coincided with the promotion of agricultural modernisation in Nepal. The Narayani River has almost 500 km of east-west catchment range. By the time the Narayani emerges on the plains of the Chitwan Valley, it carries water originating across almost half of Nepal’s mountain ranges.
The five decades of agricultural development in Nepal has meant the spread of the use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides across most of the catchment areas. Compared to other areas of high agricultural modernisation, Nepali farmers do not use that much chemicals. Still, across almost all areas of Nepal, fish populations have declined precipitously. During my own lifetime, I have seen fish disappear from our own paddy fields in the mountains, streams and marshes. Fish is not the only thing that has seen a drop. Seed varieties, bird populations, insects and many other animal populations have also been reduced.
As has become clear by now, a pristine environment accounts for a very small part of biodiversity management. Human-managed landscapes, such as farmlands, pastures and ponds account for the largest area where biodiversity needs to be protected. Many conservationists erroneously hold the view that agriculture in itself leads to a decline in biodiversity. They forget that what matters is not agricultural activity per se, but the type of agriculture.
Without the vision of building an ecologically sound agricultural base in Nepal, we are going to see a further decline in our biodiversity. This decline is not just a matter of concern for conservationists. Fishing communities, for instance, have a direct stake in conserving the catchment areas. This requires a new kind of partnership for conservation that addresses the issues of ecology, justice and participation as integral parts of biodiversity conservation in Nepal. Security sector reform should definitely be a very important part of the process of ending impunity that has become deeply entrenched among those who wield killing power. It is also time to rethink deeply the very paradigm of conservation that has been promoted during the last four decades in Nepal. New Nepal definitely requires new visions for biodiversity conservation.
Anil Bhattarai
anilbhattarai@gmail.com
Posted on: 2010-04-13 07:10
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