Sylvie Guillerme

Impacts of Public Policies and Farmer Preferences on Agroforestry Practices in Kerala, India

Agroforestry systems are fundamental features of the rural landscape of the Indian state of Kerala. Yet these mixed species systems are increasingly being replaced by monocultures. This paper explores how public policies on land tenure, agriculture, forestry and tree growing on private lands have interacted with farmer preferences in shaping land use dynamics and agroforestry practices. It argues that not only is there no specific policy for agroforestry in Kerala, but also that the existing sectoral policies of land tenure, agriculture, and forestry contributed to promoting plantation crops, even among marginal farmers. Forest policies, which impose restrictions on timber extraction from farmers’ fields under the garb of protecting natural forests, have often acted as a disincentive to maintaining tree-based mixed production systems on farmlands. The paper argues that public policies interact with farmers’ preferences in determining land use practices.

Denuded forests, wooded estates: Statemaking in a Janmam area of Gudalur, Tamil Nadu

Small farmers have been blamed for forest degradation in O’Valley, Gudalur. The state’s response to this perceived forest degradation in the post-colonial period has been to increasingly environmentalise forest policy and law through extending its territorial control over the ‘forested commons’, consequently labelling farmers as encroachers. This article argues that the state was in fact very much implicated, along with the Nilambur Kovilagam janmi (landlord), in the transformation of the forested landscape into a plantation economy so as to increase its revenue. It also highlights the contradictions in the post-colonial state’s environmentalisation of policy, the impact of this environmentalisation on small farmers and how small farmers, along with larger estate owners, resisted mostly through legal recourse the state’s efforts to reclaim undeveloped forest land. By doing so, the article highlights the contested meanings often ascribed to the forested commons that underlie conflicts over resources.