The small, door-less thatched hut — only large enough to shelter one person — looks out of place, standing alone on the forest’s edge. As we approach it, an acrid smell hits us. Grey smoke wafts from a wood fire on the floor, above which is a large batch of uppage or Malabar tamarind halfway through the process of curing.

Rudra Gowda, an areca and paddy farmer in Hukkali village in Karnataka’s Uttara Kannada district, collected the uppage from a soppinabetta (a forest patch allocated to him) nearby. “We get only ₹80 per kilo of uppage now, but it is very useful,” he says. “The oil from the seeds is good for cooking and we make alcohol with the fruit.”

The soppinabettas of northern Karnataka harbour a staggering diversity of trees, and fruit extraction is just one of the economic activities that these heavily-managed forests support. Areca (and sometimes paddy) farmers in districts including Shimoga, Chikmagalur and Uttara Kannada have usufruct rights over these foliage or leaf manure forests: they collect green foliage and dry leaf litter to use as crop manure.

The foliage also arrests weed growth and soil erosion, while maintaining soil moisture. Wood collected from these forests are a primary source of fuel. And as for medicine, “everyone in our village knows what plant to harvest from the forests for common illnesses,” says Rudra.

Post-monsoon bounty

Soppinabettas often comprise savannahs and grasslands, where farmers graze their livestock. Post-monsoon, several grasses — locally known as karada (often a mix of native grass species like Themeda triandra) and prized as a mulch plant for areca – grow in the bettas. Farmers take special care to fence off their livestock from the bettas during this time. Dry grass is harvested between December and May every year and also used as cattle fodder during the trying summer months.

While farmers have extracted these resources and nurtured these forests for around 2,000 years, they got official rights to use them in the late 1860s when the British allocated patches to farming households to prevent them from harvesting vegetation from natural forests. “The British gave us these lands,” says Raghunath Gowda, who owns a 25-acre areca farm in Ammenalli village in Uttara Kannada and has rights over almost 225 acres of soppinabetta. “Now the forest department has given us papers to support our rights after a re-survey.”

On paper, for every acre of areca crop, farmers have access to up to nine acres of forest; paddy cultivators receive up to four acres for each acre of rice in some areas.

Scientists studying the soppinabettas of Sringeri hill town (Chikmagalur district) in 2011 found that individual farmers collect around 31 metric tonnes of leaf litter and approximately 19 metric tonnes of green foliage every year.

Yet, despite such high resource extraction and human activity, soppinabettas  remain crucial habitats for biodiversity. Scientists observed as many as 114 bird species in the areca-betta landscape of Uttara Kannada; other teams have recorded more than 220 species of trees and 41 orchid species in Sringeri. Then there are the mammals: Raghunath says he has seen wild boar, leopards, gaur and sambhar in these lands.

But today, encroachment and over-extraction threaten the bettas. Legal provisions to create more agricultural areas have also caused reductions in betta lands in some areas, says Sharachchandra Lele, Senior Fellow at Bengaluru’s Ashoka Trust for Ecology and Environment, who has studied the soppinabetta system in Uttara Kannada. “In some districts, there has been extensive conversion to coffee or other plantation crops,” he says.

A sense of ownership

In 2012, scientists found that areca plantations consume six times more compost than paddy fields but generate almost four times more revenue; so farmers in Sringeri were increasingly converting paddies to areca plantations, putting a strain on bettas.

And yet, “It turns out that betta use is sustainable because there is individual control over them,” says Lele. “It has belied the claims of British and Indian foresters that such rights would, or has, led to outright forest degradation.”

“The tragedy of the commons has been largely averted because of the sense of ownership each farmer has over his betta,” says Indu K. Murthy, consultant scientist at the Centre for Sustainable Technologies, Indian Institute for Sciences. “A lot depends on the individual farmer and how he manages his soppinabetta.”

To ensure that farmers do not extract too much vegetation, Karnataka’s forest laws mandate that every hectare of betta should contain a minimum of 100 trees, of which 50 should be forest species. Raghunath however, claims he does not know of such conditions. And yet the importance of conserving the land is clear to him.

“Without soppinabettas, our areca plantations will not be productive. So we make sure it is well maintained and that we extract vegetation from different areas of the betta each year.”

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Sci-Tech> Agriculture – Field Notes / by Aathira Perinchery / January 06th, 2018