Fear-Mongering or Opinion?
Here comes another article published as an ‘Opinion’ in ‘The Hindu’ about Cauvery Calling project. The immediate thought after reading it is that this is based on an incorrect understanding of the project itself and also ironically with a half-baked understanding of the very source articles that are used for countering the project.
Some of the points I would like to highlight and clarify here:
Article: “Planting trees without addressing the social drivers that caused deforestation in the first place will not mitigate climate change because those same drivers will destroy planted forests or shift ecosystem destruction elsewhere”
The angle this author has taken is do not do any plantation drives till you fix the root cause of deforestation. I would say that is quite silly. One has to keep working on augmenting the tree cover in all ways possible without waiting for us to come up with a golden hammer solution to stop deforestation. If there was one such idea, would it not have been adopted the world over already?
Cauvery Calling is an extension of the Rally For Rivers project, which does address most of these existing problems already as part of the ‘Rally For Rivers’ draft documentation, available online at bit.ly/RFRDraft. Governments are to act on these recommendations and bring out policies to restrain deforestation.
Also, how will the factors that lead to deforestation of a proper forest area be the same with the AgroForestry model suggested by Cauvery Calling? I just do not see the correlation between the two.
Article: “such campaigns not only divert funding from conservation work, but that fast-growing trees serve an economic purpose, and should not be confused with the aim of forest restoration or a natural climate solution”
One simple thing to understand is this is a crowd-funding project and so there is no diversion of funds from existing conservation activities.
Second thing is that no one is claiming to do forest restoration as part of Cauvery Calling project. They have not mentioned so in any place and such a claim is only fictional.
Article: “The opportunity costs of using land for trees instead of other economically beneficial activities are ignored.”
This could be true. But precisely in such places is where I feel whether the author has even understood what Cauvery Calling project is about and what AgroForestry means.
If there is a land where an industry could come up and suddenly the GDP of the state or country would rise because of that, perhaps it is worth considering about opportunity costs. For a farmer, what is the opportunity cost of using land for his trees in his own farm? What does it even mean?
If he is interspersing the crops with trees, how is it a lost opportunity cost? If anything, it has been proven that having trees interspersed in crops as AgroForestry models suggest is known to increase the soil quality by enhancing its organic content and water retention abilities. So, what about the opportunity costs lost for not going towards such a beneficial solution for the farmer?
Article: “Replacing croplands with trees can result in unemployment for agricultural workers and elevate food prices”
So, the assumption of the author is that people will lose their jobs because whole croplands will be replaced with trees. That may be true elsewhere but is not a fact in this case because the AgroForestry model suggested is to move towards a maximum of 1/3rd of the farm land for commercial and fruit tree planting.
I do not know if the author has any knowledge of how the Indian farms work. There is actually no loss of jobs but to grow the trees, pluck the fruits and nuts, more people will be needed.
If anything, technology entering into the agriculture sector is the main factor that will lead to reduction in agricultural workers and not AgroForestry.
Article: “Where natural regeneration is insufficient, targeted planting of a few trees from the local landscape must be done.”
Well, this is precisely what the Cauvery Calling team has also been suggesting. Not all of the area they are suggesting is a crop land.
The team is actively working with Karnataka and Tamilnadu state governments to rejuvenate the barren land coming under forest area with more targeted plantation and enhance the green cover that way.
Article: “A common misconception is that planting trees on a massive scale will result in more rainfall, lesser soil erosion, and stabilise groundwater levels in degraded and coastal zones.”
This may be true but we are not talking about coastal areas in first place. Most of it is about agriculture lands and degraded forest lands. Once again, it shows how little understanding the author really has.
May be the author should read this post by an actual Water expert to understand this eco-dynamic better.
Article: “An article in Mongabay India (January 2020), says that ‘while Isha Foundation says it won’t plant monoculture plantations, the vagueness of the project has left it open for criticism’.”
This is a joke because the foundation has clearly said that there are at least 30 species of trees that it is distributing to farmers to plant in their lands. How does this become monoculture?
The very article the author is using also talks about monoculture in the context of ‘eucalyptus’ trees. Now, anyone who knows something about South India knows that they see eucalyptus only in some hilly areas and not in the plains, definitely not in farm lands. So this whole monoculture thing has no basis whatsoever.
Article: “But accounting for agricultural land and forest area, the planting density would be approximately 140 trees per acre”
This argument has been coming in various different models and varieties basically stating that these many trees cannot be planted in the Cauvery basin. We have debunked that myth countless number of times.
Let’s look at this from a purely statistical point of view. The average number of trees per square kilometre can go upto 100,000 per square km.
https://www.quora.com/How-many-trees-does-it-take-to-make-a-forest-1km-2
It comes to about 24,200 square kilometres for planting all the 242 crore trees. The Cauvery basin overall is 81,155 km2 (31,334 square miles).
This matches perfectly with what Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev has said in his videos that he is asking farmers to consider less than 1/3rd of the land in Cauvery basin to be converted to agro-forestry. So, the argument of no-land to plant all these trees is an invalid one.
The author of this article himself says that Forrest Fleischman, whose paper he extensively uses in bits and pieces (both in understanding and literally) to talk ill about the Cauvery Calling project, asks for people-centered natural climate solutions.
If Cauvery Calling is not a ‘people-centered’ and ‘natural climate’ solution, I really do not know what is. There are hundreds of farmers who have benefitted from this project already.
In my opinion, this whole article in ‘The Hindu’ is about fear-mongering about a eco-social project, without giving any clear counter opinions or alternate solutions to Cauvery Calling.
