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Jum
Cultivation and Environmental Degradation in CHT
By
Rabi Shankar Chakma, Member, Convening Committee,
United People's Democratic Front (UPDF)
Lately, increased concern
is being raised from various quarters about the environment
in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Almost all these concerns unanimously
attribute the cause of environmental degradation to the system
of Jum cultivation. But nobody seems to care to ponder as
to why once a viable and sustainable method of cultivation
in the CHT, the Jumming has nowadays turned out to
be a cause for concern of the environmentalists. We must bear
in mind that this state of things is not the result of a sudden
change. Nor has it reached such a stage overnight. Rather,
it is the result of a vicious process initiated long ago,
and many factors have contributed to it. Thus only cursing
the Jum cultivation and overlooking other major factors will
never help. This brief article attempts to focus on these
factors and seeks to address the question why jumming
has ceased to become environment-friendly.
There is a widespread belief
that the Jum system represents a primitive mode of agriculture.
Both colonial and post-colonial rulers held this fallacious
view and took measures to regulate and restrict shifting cultivation.
But it is quite unfair to denounce a system, which has sustained
for centuries and fed the people for generations without causing
threat to environment. A comparative analysis between shifting
and plough cultivation would reveal that both types of agriculture
represent two different modes of adaptation to different natural
environments. Both of them exist in a predominantly feudalistic
society and have their own advantages as well as inherent
limitations.
Some scholars and environmentalists
point to the non-existence of title deed in jum system in
order to prove its primitiveness. This is also an erroneous
view. The reason for the non-existence of individual private
ownership in jum system is to be found not in its so-called
primitiveness or backwardness, but in the peculiar characteristic
of the system itself. In this system of agriculture the cultivators
are required to abandon the jum field for a few years after
cultivation and to move to other areas. This means that unlike
plough cultivation, the jum cultivators are not tied to any
particular jum field. Hence, it is only natural that the concept
of communal ownership, and not private ownership, should be
compatible with the system of jum cultivation. In passing
it should be mentioned here that in recent years the jum cultivation
has undergone some changes in some areas of the Chittagong
Hill Tract. The most notable change is the use of pesticide
and chemical fertilizer to boost production. Besides, few
jum cultivators are more interested to produce cash crops
like ginger and turmeric than to grow paddy, which is the
common feature throughout the Chittagong Hill Tracts.
The CHT was once called the
Karpas Mahal as it used to produce Karpas or cotton abundantly.
It was in Mougal and, to some extent, British colonial period.
Life was very simple in those days. The Jumias (Jum cultivators)
would produce almost everything necessary for subsistence
in their Jum field, such as rice, cotton, turmeric, cucumber
etc. The forest would also provide them with a variety of
produces ranging from household materials to herbal medicines.
Only one or two articles would have to be bought from the
market. But notwithstanding, jum cultivation has its own limitations.
The understanding of this fact led to the adoption of plough
cultivation during British period. Whether this new form of
cultivation is more advanced than the Jum system is open to
discussion, but the adoption of plough cultivation gave the
Hill people a settled life in the sense that it does not require
the cultivators to leave their villages. (In the case of Jum
farming they have to live in the Jum field away from the village
until harvesting is complete. After that they come back to
the village again. Thus one should not think that Jum system
is associated with nomadism). It was the beginning of a new
era and its implications on the socio-political development
of the Hill people had been far-reaching. It provided the
basis for the rise of the educated middle class that was to
play the central role in the nationalist movement in the sixties
and seventies. Anyway, by the time the Kaptai Hydroelectric
project was built in the early sixties, about two-thirds of
the total population of the Hill people had taken to plough
cultivation. But this natural process of transformation was
hampered by the construction of the Kaptai dam which inundated
54 thousand acres of first class land of the Hill people.
These were the lands where the Hill people had settled for
plough cultivation. The impact of the dam on both the socio-economic
and environmental aspects of the CHT society is colossal.
Unlike the plainsland of the country, the CHT has very limited
cultivable land, and following the Kaptai flooding the amount
of such land reduced significantly forcing a large number
of the evicted people to cross over to India. Of those who
stayed back, very few families were rehabilitated and the
rest were compelled to fall back on Jum cultivation, as there
were no options left for them. This backward moving aspect
of the Hill people resulting from the Kaptai dam is often
overlooked, and much less is ascertained as to the extent
it created negative impact on environment.
Another issue that affects
every aspect of the Hill peoples` life and society including
environment is the influx of the settlers, who were brought
into the CHT under government sponsored scheme for political
purposes. This happened at a time during the rule of Ziaur
Rahaman when the Hill people were still reeling under the
impact of the Kaptai dam. This also complicated the problem
of the Chittagong Hill Tracts to a greater extent. Although
the settlers were promised lands and resettlement in the Hill
Tracts, they could not be given so, as lands were not available
at all. Apart from the fact that the settlers were used by
the military as human shields in their so-called counter insurgency
operations against the now-defunct Shanti Bahini, they were
encouraged to grab lands belonging to the Hill people. Massacres
and attacks on the Hill people were often followed by seizure
of their lands. Initially, the Shanti Bahini made strong protest
and resorted to armed actions to drive the settlers out. But
this policy proved counter-productive. Almost without exception,
each attack by Shanti Bahini on the settlers was followed
by reprisal attacks on the Hill people's villages, and ultimately
it was the innocent Jumma people who were at the receiving
end. They saw their houses being burned, near and dear ones
killed or maimed or tortured, and lands taken over by outsiders.
In this process they were evicted for the second time from
their heart and homes, pushed further into the remotest hilly
sides and forced to take up shifting cultivation again. This
is how the number of the Jumias swelled over the
last few years contributing to the accelerated pace of environmental
degradation. The Chittagong Hill Tracts Commission, which
visited the Hill Tracts in 1990, wrote in its report titled
"Life Is Not Ours: Land and Human Rights in the Chittagong
Hill Tracts","However, as the Commission was
told by a military officer in Langadu, when the Bengali settlers
came the hill people had to move further into the hills. Their
plow land was taken over by the Bengalis and many of the hill
people had no other means of living left than by Jum cultivation."
After the signing of the CHT
accord jum cultivation has increased overnight. This is due
to two reasons. Firstly, there is no one to check it. Before
the surrender the JSS had to control the system, as their
strategy of guerilla warfare demanded it. Secondly, economic
hardship and poverty forced the people to take up this system
of cultivation. According to our estimate, about five hundred
families are now engaged in jum cultivation in Sajek area
of Rangamati alone. Half of them are from Jurachari and Bhusahn
Chara of the same district. These families were evicted from
their villages during the eighties. Most of them have plough
lands, which are now being occupied by the Bengalee settlers.
As they found no other means of livelihood, they relapsed
into this traditional method of cultivation.
However, it needs to be mentioned
here that even during the British period the area of jum cultivation
shrank as a result of the creation of Reserve Forest, District
Forest and Un-classed State Forest. It is the economic considerations,
but not the desire to save the environment, that prompted
the British to take this measure. By doing this they sought
to monopolize the trade in railway sleeper that was in high
demand at the time. Jum Cultivation was prohibited in these
areas. [For more details, see Politics of Nationalism,
the Case of Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh by Amena
Mohsin]
From the foregoing paragraphs
it is clear that the problem of Jum cultivation is connected
with other issues like construction of Kaptai dam and the
influx of the settlers in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. The
Commission is of the same view. It further wrote: "A
report of the CHT Soil and Land Use Survey of 1966 indicated
that after the construction of the Kaptai dam the Jhumma families
who did not receive any compensation after their land had
been inundated and the displaced flat land cultivators moved
higher up on the hill slopes and shifting cultivation consequently
increased. This while one of the envisaged effects of the
Kaptai dam had been that Jhum cultivation would decrease because
it would create more employment opportunities. Another conclusion
of the same report was that shifting cultivation had become
a problem only in places where the population growth had increased
the competition for land and shortened the period of land
rotation".
Another issue responsible
for the deterioration of the ecological balance in the CHT
is logging business. But unfortunately, this issue is seldom
dicussed. The national newspapers often publish reports of
timber being seized by the government authorities. These reports
of illegal logging however do not say about how many cfts
of timber are transported to the plainsland without being
caught by the authorities, but no doubt these are indicative
of the gravity of the situation. Logging business is the biggest
sector in the CHT where private capital investment comes from
the plainsland, but its share of responsibility for the depletion
of forest is often ignored. If proper investigation is carried
out then it would be found that the unscrupulous businessmen
and forest officials are doing more harms to the environment
than Jum cultivation. It should be remembered that it was
not Jum cultivation but afforestation program of the ADB and
logging business which destroyed the vast Madhupur forest
in Mymensingh.
So the conclusion of this
article is that the shifting cultivation would not have been
a cause for deterioration of environment in the Chittagong
Hill Tracts if the above mentioned factors had not existed.
The threat to environment cannot be seen in isolation from
the threat to the survival of the Hill people. The issue of
the settlers, the problem of the Jum cultivators and the environment
are inextricably linked with each other, and thus the solution
of one of them can never be found without touching the others.
It therefore follows that if the environmental problem is
to be addressed, resettlement of the Jum cultivators becomes
imperative. And to do this would entail serttlements of the
other issues mentioned above.
The
article has been published in the daily Star in abridged form.
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