The Economic Survey Mizoram 2012-13 made a bold claim. After quoting the Forest Survey of India’s (FSI) State of Forest Report 2011 that 90.68% of Mizoram is under forest cover, the Economic Survey claimed, literally in bold letters in a box, that the State’s forests

have suffered serious depletion and degradation due to traditional practice of shifting cultivation, uncontrolled fire, unregulated fellings etc.

The claim is a frequent one made by the state government and the agri-horticulture bureaucracy. Actually, what the 2011 FSI Report said was

Due to change in customary cultivation practices, focus has now shifted to raising horticultural crops… thus preventing secondary growth on old shifting cultivation patches. This has also led to the decline in forest cover assessed in the state.

Thus, Mizoram’s forest cover may be taking a turn for the worse not because of shifting cultivation but because of the State’s push to establish permanent cultivation, notably horticulture crops such as oil palm.

  • An oil palm plantation on a steep slope adjoining Dampa Tiger Reserve, Mizoram (Photo via Wikimedia Commons).
  • Tropical rainforests cleared for oil palm plantation in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo (Photo via Wikimedia Commons).
  • Forest areas have shrunk to fragments as oil palm plantations expand over vast areas in south-east Asian countries, like here in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo (Photo via Wikimedia Commons).
  • Oil palm promotional poster along the highway near Lengpui airport.
  • Oil palm plantations now occupy shifting cultivation fields on slopes and wet rice cultivation areas in valleys.
  • Converting secondary forests and shifting agriculture to oil palm is a travesty of watershed management.

… This post appeared in my blog on the Coyotes Network 24 August 2014 and in Newslink, a daily published from Aizawl, Mizoram, on 20 August 2014. [Original PDF here]. … Read more in the The Wild Heart of India: Nature and Conservation in the City, the Country, and the Wild.