Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
households and better-off ones related to land area are minimal (4.5 haal for
better-off and poor households). The type of land to which households have
access is very important. Lack of access to quality land (i.e. land with irrigation,
less steep land and/or land near the village) is more prevalent among food-
insecure households, especially Dalits, and it makes them even more vulnerable
to unpredictable rainfall or animals eating their plants. As one Dalit woman said,
'why should we work on our [bad] fields, since it doesn't rain they no longer
produce any food anyway'.
Social structures, such as caste, determine not only access to land (quantity
and quality), but also access to other (non-agricultural) livelihood strategies.
In order to explain vulnerability at the household level it is necessary to look
beyond the linear impacts of climate variability on traditional agricultural
indicators. People use a range of livelihood and social strategies to manage what
are in effect interactions between climatic and other social and environmental
stressors and not one single climate stressor. According to household interviews,
important stress factors in addition to climatic variability and change include
lack of quality land, lack of manpower, lack of manure, failing trade, and high
taxes to be paid to the Community Forest Groups in southern areas when sheep
and goats are brought to graze during the winter.
The villagers in all three locations said that those with the most diverse
livelihood options were the least vulnerable to climate variability. Very few
households in Humla can produce enough food for the whole year, and most
combine various strategies to access food. Trade is by far the second most
important livelihood strategy after agriculture and livestock, as this allows
households to purchase food at the Tibetan border or to buy subsidized rice
from the Nepal Food Corporation (NFC). As one better-off informant in
Khankhe explained, 'Without trade we would be poor.' Another, in Syaandaa,
stated that without the market of Thaklakot in Tibet, 'there would be no village'.
However, capacity to engage in trade varies greatly between villages and
between households. Trade is most important in the village of Khaagaalgaon.
Families here have almost twice as high incomes from trade as do households
in Syaandaa and nine times as much as the average Dalit household in Khankhe
(a median of NR 92,700, NR 50,000 and NR 10,000 6 respectively). Within the
three villages, the difference is also striking: some families would make more
than NR 200,000, while poor families reported incomes of less than NR 10,000
per year.
These differences in trade between and within villages can be explained
partly by socio-cultural and geographical characteristics (see for example Fisher
1987; von Fürer-Haimendorf 1988), but also by the strength of networks and
personal relations. All informants still consider access to political and social
networks as essential for success in trading. Consequently, as is the case with
access to land, trade is mostly concentrated in the hands of better-off families
and households from high castes, leaving behind those with fewer resources and
low-caste families that lack the necessary connections.
 
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