Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Revisiting Himalayan Dilemma

The monsoon has already spread its tentacles across the vast expanses of South Asia. It’s now time, once again, to hit the headlines of national as well as international news dailies and reputed magazines with stories of floods across the Gangetic - India and Bangladesh and resultant human-monetary-environment tragedy therein. By the end of the year a number of research papers too will be published, often based on stories of media reports, popular magazines and comments of some organizational heads working on environment. That is that; it is not a new story. Every year during the monsoon the Himalayan region appears in the headlines because of large scale flooding in the plains of Ganges and Brahmaputra. As usual, this is also the time to go through the yearly practice of accusing farmers of the Himalayas, particularly the Nepal Himalaya, for sending down the floods in ever-higher volumes.

Floods occur on the Gangetic plain and Bangladesh every year largely due to their geo-environmental locations. We have, however, never been clear as to what extent of floods occur due to natural phenomenon and to what extent human activities like deforestation in the upstream or building of embankments downstream are responsible for increasing the inundation and deteriorating the flood situation in modern times. It is also not clear whether the floods are increasing in frequency and intensity over the decades, as is strongly claimed. In fact, recent work (Hofer, T. and Messerli, B., The United Nations University Press, 2006 in press) indicates that there has been little or no increases in frequency or intensity of flooding over the past 200 years.

Theory of Himalayan Degradation and Down-stream Floods

Environmental gossipmongers over the last 3 decades have been, nonetheless, accusing the Himalayan environmental degradation as a pertinent factor resulting in the monsoon tragedy on the Gangetic plain and Bangladesh. They say wanton deforestation in the Himalaya by poor farmers is responsible for flooding, which has been allegedly increasing with time. Such a thesis, based not on scientific fact but on assumption and emotion, that ignorant mountain minority farmers are devastating the forests and consequently causing serious down stream environmental and socio-economic damage is popularly known as the Theory of Himalayan Environmental Degradation.

Professor Jack D. Ives writes in his recent book: Himalayan Perception- Environmental Change and the well being of mountain people (2004) ‘The Himalayan degradation theory proposes that increased devastating flooding on the Ganges and Brahmaputra lowlands is a direct response to extensive deforestation in the Himalaya. The deforestation is presumed as a result of a rapid growth in the mountain subsistence farming populations dependent on the forests for fodder and fuel and for conversion to terraced agriculture. As steep mountain slopes are denuded of forest cover, it is assumed that the heavy monsoon rains cause accelerated soil erosion, numerous landslides, and increased runoff and sediment transfer onto the plains inducing a progressive increase in flooding of Gangetic India and Bangladesh and hence putting at risk the lives of several hundred million people’. Ives strongly criticizes this theory based on the 25 years of research that he and his team have carried out in the region. According to Dr. T. Hofer, physical geographer at the University of Berne and FAO scientist, ‘such a supposedly scientific chain of events has served as an expedient tool for both the plains politician and his counterpart in the hills. For the former, it has been useful in times of flood-related crises to pin the blame on the peasantry of a remote region. His hill counterpart, meanwhile, was amenable to accepting the blame because bad science was presented to him as fait accompli and also because the aid agencies funded reforestation programmes in the bargain’.

The genesis of the theory can be traced to the GTZ-UNESCO conference of December 1974 in Munich, if not earlier. The summery report of the proceedings noted ‘these mountain regions are seriously and increasingly affected by processes of deforestation, soil erosion, improper land use, and poor water management. Overuse of mountain environments has a widening impact on the plains with downstream floods, the siltation of dams and harbours and on the damage of crops and of homesteads’. Eckholm’s paper published in Science (1975) and his book Losing Ground (1976) supporting the Himalayan Degradation Theory added fuel to the fire. His arguments dominated mountain environment and development thought for over 15 years and are influential even at present times in many areas of government and institutional decision making. Subsequently, the World Bank in its report (1979) predicted a total loss of accessible forest cover in Nepal by 2000. Today intellectuals laugh at the predictions of the World Bank given the fact that Himalayan Kingdom of Nepal has forest cover as intact as it was in 1970s. Several other reputed institutes, including the World Resources Institute (1985), Asian Development Bank (1982), and Centre for Science and Environment (1982, 1991) spoke with great authority in similar terms.

The Bangladesh Observer (June 2, 1990) under the headline ‘Deforestation in the Himalaya Aggravating Floods’ reported the comments of Dr. Tolba, then Executive Director, UNEP, stating ‘…the chronic deforestation in the Himalayan watersheds was already complicating and compounding seasonal floods in Bangladesh…700,000 people died in Bangladesh in 1970 because of flooding’. Many well-known academicians, foresters, environmentalists, journalists and technocrats were not behind in highlighting their points supporting the cause. As a result, the theory of Himalayan Environmental Degradation became all time strong in the 80s.

In the mean time, (donor) agencies, supported by the vested interests in government departments, NGOs, academics, media, and politics were busy repeating the same story over and over across the countries of the region. The lack of scientific confirmation did not deter them from engaging in passionate condemnation of upstream inhabitants for the inundation of South-Asian lowlands, particularly in years when the floods were high. Scholars argue today that it was nothing more than environmental geo-politics in order to enlarge the development budgets and expand and prolong the development projects by vested interests, both from within and outside the region.

The Anti-thesis

The theory of Himalayan degradation and consequent flooding of Gangetic India and Bangladesh started receiving critical review from the academics undertaking research in the Himalayan region from around mid-1980s. Several research groups and individuals began detailed studies and also became aware of each other’s work through research journals like Mountain Research and Development. Further, the Mohonk conference on the ‘Himalaya-Ganges Problem’ in May 1986 served as an initial platform to debunk the theory of Himalayan environmental degradation. The very objective of the conference was to discuss, debate and investigate the prevailing Himalayan environmental paradigm of the 1970s and 1980s. The conference paved the way for the publication of The Himalayan Dilemma: Reconciling Development and Conservation (1989) under the authorship of two great scholars, Jack D. Ives and Bruno Messerli, where the authors challenged the prevailing Himalayan environmental notion with several scientific evidences and asked for a more focused and rigorous empirical research in order to substantiate the many environmental issues that had been raised. Since 1989 a vast amount of related environmental research has been undertaken. Although scattered widely across the literature, majority of them support the findings of Ives and Messerli.

Among other scientific findings, data collected and analysed between 1992 and 1996 by a Bangla-Swiss team led by Bruno Messerli and Thomas Hofer provides scientific evidence to further disprove the Himalayan Degradation Theory and presents new suggestions as to the cause of Bangladesh floods. The study clarifies: ‘floods in Bangladesh and India are largely independent of human activities in the upper catchment areas. Neither the frequency nor the volume of flooding has increased in Bangladesh over the last 120 years. Precipitation and runoff in the Himalaya do not seem to be important causes of floods in Bangladesh’.

It is now clear that there was hardly any rigorous environmental research carried out in the Himalayan region prior to 1980 and the account of the alarmist Himalayan degradation discourse in both the academic and popular literature was based upon supposition and emotion that entered policy formulation. Such discourse subsequently entered into the environmental and development politics of the region. According to Professor Ives, ‘examination of many of the reports prepared for aid agencies and local governments are particularly revealing- successive consultants simply reproduced the conclusions of their predecessors. There were exceptions although; the ‘white noise’ was almost overwhelming’.

The basic objective of this note is not to claim that the Himalayas are as green and pure as they were. Environmental situations have been changing across spaces of the globe and the Himalayas cannot be an exception. In this connection, mention should be made that environmental problems in several parts of the Himalaya are serious and in some places severe needing immediate scientific attention. However, it is important also to understand that the environmental degradation theory which openly blames poor subsistence mountain farmers for degrading the Himalayan environment and levels them as direct agents of Indo-Gangetic plain and Bangladesh floods is not true. Such a theory became prominent over the years due to vested interests, environmental politics, popular writings and massive media support without any scientific rigour. Today, it is accepted at least among researchers that the assumed environmental threat of the Himalayas on South Asian lowlands advocated by the Theory of Himalayan Environmental Degradation is far from truth. Rather, there are other pertinent forces including geomorphic, administrative/policy related, developmental, (geo)political, and ethnic/religious (including terrorism) that have played major role in directing the human security paradigm over the years and have acted as dominant factors of instability in the region. The tragedy of this situation is that poor mountain people, as in many other parts of the world, have become victims of convenience. This process has diverted attention away from the real problems – repression and/or neglect of minorities, social unrest and poverty, corruption, all of which contribute to the current violence that affects much of the region.

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