An Overview Of Our Solution
In India, outside every declared nature conservation park there are issues of human-wild life conflict such as crop raiding by wild animals, which is an underestimated problem. The constant threat of crop predators and perceived loss in crop produce discourages agriculture in close vicinity of the wild life park. Farming is actually the main livelihood for the people living near all such areas. It is an urgent need to provide alternative and additional options that can contribute to sustainable farming in those regions.
There is a massive demand for medicinal plants for human medicinal needs, which are normally exploited from the forests. Considering the developing medicinal plant demand, there is potential in cultivating non-palatable traded medicinal plant species in such conflict regions, that are resistant to crop-raiding by wildlife.
Who is this solution impacting?
Community Type
Suburban
Rural
Additional Information
- Population Impacted:
- Continent: Asia
General Information
Organization type
individual
Ecosystem (select all that apply)
Forests
Population impacted
At least 1,000 people per park
Challenge
Size of agricultural area
All agricultural areas bordering India’s National Parks
Production quantity
Depends on the medicinal plants selected for cultivation
People employed
Farmers will adopt it once educated
Solution
Describe your solution
We have experimented with cultivation of few non-palatable medicinal plant species which are in high demand in the TATR fringe areas. Our observation is that if non-palatable medicinal are grown in fringe forest areas, raiding herbivores do not prefer to touch them. We have validated this with our experiments in the TATR fringe regions. This medicinal produce acts as an additional steady income source for the farmers, once that is linked to the medicinal supply chain.
Such cultivated medicinal produce also reduces the exploitation of forests by the demands of the ayurvedic medicinal industry. Another side benefit is that since these medicinal plants are hardy and resistant to pests, so no chemical fertilizers and pesticides are needed to nurture them, this increases the organic farming footprint in that region. It is also possible to build cottage industries catering to "value added" medicinal product in this region to give more economic value to these communities. These cottage industries can provide additional livelihood to groups such as women and young people along with farmers, leading to more gainful employment for the villages.
Once this gets adopted by the fringe villages they show positive societal acceptance of the conserved areas and National parks.
Implementation
Describe your implementation
We started by conducting interactive and practical training sessions for farmers to help them understand why this could solve their raiding problems, how to cultivate and nurture these plants and also link them to the market once ready.
Specific activities
- Selection of candidate non-palatable medicinal species suitable for target region
- Training of farmers around Protected Areas in the benefits of this approach
- Providing them a booklet for reference in local language
- Linking of end produce to medicinal supply chain at nearest city Nagpur
Bringing change in human activities
- Training and actual demonstrations to farmers
- Providing scientific technical inputs for their queries
- Linking them to potential buyers with a buy-back contract to ensure market for this new additional crop
- Measuring the reduction in raiding related losses, and promoting the wins in the community to get more widespread adoption.
Enabling conditions
- Ensuring market linkage for this produce in the medicinal supply chain is critical
- Instead of selling plant parts, value added produce such as dried leaves, powders, tea-bags, concentrated extracts will give more economic value to this activity. Local community help groups will need to trained in doing this and share this across village communities.
- Key success factors
- Involvement of local organizations as training partners, biodiversity management committees to approach farmers, initiation of federation of farmers in the area, local language learning resource development for awareness and adoption of model
Obstacles overcome
The possible bottleneck was adoption of this new concept by these affected farmers. Our initial workshop was aimed at overcoming this. Working hand in hand with the farmers in the field during plantation and harvesting was needed to get the first batch underway.
External connections
Farmers
Local nurseries
Cultivation experts
Local community trainers
Medicinal Plant Traders
Buy back guarantors in the form of ayurvedic companies
Subsidies by government for such areas – yet to be developed
Results
What is the environmental or ecological challenge you are targeting with your solution?
Agriculture close to protected areas (PAs) often faces crop raiding by wild herbivores. The constant threat of crop predators and perceived loss in crop produce has discouraged agriculture in close vicinity of the wild life parks. Agriculture is the main occupation in such fringe areas, over 58 per cent of the rural households depend on agriculture as their principal means of livelihood.
This loss of produce leads to social disturbance and negative feelings towards protection of conserved forests and animals. There is a need to help in reducing such crop losses, so that farmers can derive sustainable income from their land. This will lead to better social participation towards conservation objectives as well.
Describe the context in which you are operating
Owing to the vicinity of forests, buffer areas have distinct advantages in agriculture such as good ground water levels and availability of green manure. The main problem of these areas is crop-raiding herbivores. In order to avoid economic loss, farmers apply a range of protective measures. They include manual guarding, fences, trenches and other devices. However, these measures often come with high associated costs and risks. The traditional fences are made using wooden poles and thorny branches lopped from nearby forests causing substantial damage to the forest. Destructive measures such as traps can kill or injure animals. Sophisticated means such as electric fences are expensive and fail with power outage. All of these are known to fail at some or the other point of time. The traditional practices which generally keep raiding at bay and even culling are not advisable to avoid this conflict.
Therefore this problem of preventing crop raiding needs an alternative approach.
How did you impact natural resource use and greenhouse gas emissions?
The innovative solution proposed here will help in supporting the current agriculture based livelihoods and also support conservation of wildlife by reducing human-wildlife conflicts.
It will address the medicinal plant demand by curbing current and direct pressures on forest resources. With simple value addition techniques, the produce can be made available for small scale medicinal industry establishing new employment strategies for the women and youth in such affected regions. Farmers can scale up the production if they form their own co-operative society and adopt appropriate post-harvest technologies, value additions and QPM (Quality Planting Materials) management. It is also possible to have purchase tie ups with the herbal medicine industry.
Such employment if linked to the co-operative groups will be a win-win model for local farmers
This is a solution that comes under landscape treatment which is very important for such sensitive areas
Water
No significant change in water use, selection of plants which are drought resistant can reduce water usage
Food Security/Nutrition
Reduction of raiding enhance the actual food crop yield in the region. The medicinal produce can supplement the nutraceutical industry
Economic/Sustainable Development
No additional land use is required to produce this alternative crop. Overall yield of the region is increased due to reduction in raiding. Value added industry based on medicinal produce will increase gainful employment and economic output of that region, without any increase in pollution
Climate
Protected forest areas will get more social acceptance, leading to better conservation of forest ecosystem and thus to better climate outcomes
Sustainability
This model study is an attempt to reduce the crop raiding and to provide economic alternative to the farmers. We developed a working model to mitigate human-wildlife conflict. Our study also addresses biodiversity conservation, rural development, crop raiding, employment strategies, diversification, and behavioral development of the community over their territory.
This venture can be independently run by the community after a certain period of intervention and primary seed funding. These parks also attract a large number of tourists, selling some value-added produce from these medicinal plants to them can give additional cash business to the locals. (like herbal tea or dried medicinal produce in packets)
Return on investment
We invested $6000 in the initial training and workshops in the selected villages. This has helped promote about 100 farmers to adopt this solution of alternative farming. As an estimate each farmer suffers a loss of $850 due to raiding. If this approach can reduce the losses by 50% per farmer, it is a net saving of $35,000 which is a potential of about 5x savings.
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Replication and Scale
How could we successfully replicate this solution elsewhere?
This model suggests that the diversification of agriculture in man-wildlife conflict areas will be useful for livelihood enhancement. A closer linkage between the producers and processors of medicinal plants through direct farmer’s participation could result in benefits to both in terms of price, quality, lead time. This pilot is a base for research, training, and knowledge sharing about cultivation and post-processing practices of medicinal plants. It is now important to replicate this as a successful model for alternative livelihoods.
This model being awareness based can directly contribute to farmer’s livelihood, in the form of non-palatable medicinal plant cultivation, and in meeting the demand of raw materials required for herbal medicine industries.
Future funding is required to link medicinal markets and supply chains, conduct Trainings, for Resource development, booklets and brochures and replicating this model for villages in buffer zone areas of national parks