In Nepal’s high mountains, greenhouse farming tackles climate crisis
The nationwide lockdown enforced to contain the spread of coronavirus last year pushed Tashi Mendok into despair.
The 51-year-old widow was facing something totally different than what the rest of the people in Nepal were experiencing during those testing times. So was the problem of remaining locals in her village Samagaon, the last human settlement in the Manaslu region on the northern part of Nepal.
Rather than the health crisis being faced by the rest of the population they have been struggling with a different issue: an acute food crisis.
At an altitude of 3,550 meters, Mendok and her neighbors were running out of options. Traditionally, the village’s harsh climate enables locals to grow only two crops — barley and potatoes — once a year only, over a duration of four to five months. From the nearest road head, it takes 6 days of walking to reach the village.
The devastatingly disruptive effects of climate change on the harvests coupled to road blockages due to successive lockdowns made food availability and access particularly scarce in the village. The problem became worse since the emergence of global health pandemic in early 2020, even threatening the lives of elder villagers.
To come out of deepening food crisis, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche decided to help the poorest villagers in the community mostly widows without any income and women without land and cattle to build 15 passive solar, cold climate greenhouses made of 45cm stone walls and double layered polycarbonate roofs.
Mindok was one among beneficiaries of climate change, resilient tunnel farming and other schemes.
“Every year, vegetable farming in our area was turning from bad to worse. One had to pay Rs 110 to transport a kilogram of vegetables from the nearby market as the village is remote and road connectivity is bad,” said Mindok, “We are so happy to have vegetables in our courtyard because of greenhouse farming.”
Mindok earned some money this year by selling vegetables. But she couldn’t earn much this year as expected as she was a little bit late to start vegetable farming and trekking was badly affected due to covid-19 crisis.
“We managed to make some money when climbers were back to scale Mount Manaslu,” Mindok seemed hopeful, “Hope, more tourists will come to the village, and we will be successful to sell more vegetables and earn more money.”
Her village is the last one to host trekkers and climbers on the way to Mt. Manaslu (8163m- Eighth highest peak in the world) and due to COVID restrictions, not many tourists came to Nepal in 2020 and 2021.
One of her sons studies at a private school in Kathmandu. Another one studies Buddhism at a monastery. Her daughter lives in this remote village.
Most locals in Samagaon have been coping with the harsh climate and global health crisis. To ease their lifestyle green houses were installed.
The greenhouses were designed to provide vegetables 10 months a year and meant to be multifunctional: they were built, when possible, sharing their back wall with a house, so as to provide heating in addition to food during the cold winter months.
Supported by the Global Environment Facility Small Grants Programme of UN Development Program Nepal, Tergar Charity Nepal, a non-governmental organization led by Rinpoche Yongey has implemented his entrepreneurial vision of starting vegetable farming and cultivating a special type of goji berry only found in Samagaun, known as Himalayan berry, which is different from gojis found in China and locally called in Tibetan language “gob-chi”. In Samagaon, he used to relish the sweet and tangy taste eating them straight out of the bush when he played in the mountains of Samagaun as a child.
Mountain Partnership and Slow Food Programme are also supporting to develop Participatory Guarantee System in order to sustainably market this mountain product.
Traditionally, goji berries are consumed in the village as herbal tea and used in Tibetan medicine for their action on lowering blood pressure and improving vision. The non-governmental organization aims to increase food and nutrition security of the most vulnerable in the community of Samagaun Village. This will ensure food security of 174 households including women and children in Samagaun through improved resilience and climate adaptability of agriculture.
Since this Spring, Rinpoche started to make that vision a reality by working on an organic goji berry value chain development project to sell Samagaun gojis as herbal tea, exclusively grown, picked and sundried by the village’s women and aiming to provide them an income.
Fifteen plants were planted in May in the greenhouse beneficiaries’ kitchen gardens, and a cooperative of goji growers and harvesters was formed in September.
The gojis, after having been picked and dried in solar dryers by the women of the cooperative, will be taken down to Kathmandu before being shipped directly to Canada.
Gojis are bright orange or red, ellipsoid berries 1–2 cm in diameter. They contain compressed yellow seeds, from 2.5 to 3 mm wide; their number varies widely based on fruit size, from 10 to 60. As a type of the Northern Hemisphere, flowering occurs from June through September and berry maturation from August to October, depending on the latitude, altitude, and climate.
China is the main supplier of goji berry products in the world, with total exports generating US$120 million in 2004. The majority of commercially produced wolfberries comes from L. Barbarup plantations in Ningxia and Xinjiang in Northwestern China. The cultivation is centered in Ningxia Hui Autonomous region of North-Central China, centered in Zhongning County. The plant is also cultivated in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China.
It is also grown in Tibet, Mongolia and more recently in many other countries of the world. Chinese gojis are traditionally used in Chinese medicine, and the berries of L. barbarum are the only therapeutic grade (“superior-grade”) kinds of wolfberries used by practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine As Ningxia’s borders merge with three deserts L. barbarum is also planted to control erosions and reclaim irrigable soils from desertification. Since about 2000, goji berries and derived products became common in developed countries as “super foods”, health foods and alternative medicine remedies. Gojis are most often sold in dried form.
The project is working hard to mobilize the local women group based on their interest and commitments to grow vegetables and gojis and grab maximum benefit from these agro works.
Margot Clavier, Project Coordinator for Treger Charity Nepal, is mostly based in Samafaun and is witnessing the changes taking place in the remote village.
“I am very overwhelmed to see change happening in the village at such a rapid pace. The villagers have totally adopted the greenhouses and seeing them making full use of them and obtaining great yields which improves their nutrition and income warms my heart. A special mention goes to the village blacksmith who is considered very low cast and is very discriminated in the village, but has managed to beautifully grow every vegetables that we had in the book! He has even managed to grow chillies and his cucumbers, tomatoes zucchinis and beans are truly looking great!,” says Clavier.
The greenhouses were finished in August, and the results are outstanding: zucchinis, cucumbers, beans, tomatoes, as well as cabbage, cauliflower, different types of lettuce, saag (Nepali spinach), spinach and chilli now grow at more than 3550 m of altitude, improving the entire community’s nutrition, and enabling greenhouse owners to gain income by selling their fresh vegetables to others.
The village is at a crossroads. Although still very cut from the outside world and remote, Clavier says, things are changing quickly and the road coming in 3–4 years will accelerate the changes in livelihoods and lifestyles.
“As it is most often the case, modernity had its load of good and bad. It will be villagers’ responsibility to choose a pathway to development that does not replicate the mistakes that were done in the West, but emphasize solutions which are sustainable, both in term of humans development as regarding biodiversity, cultural heritage and climate change mitigation,” says Clavier.
Things have greatly changed after locals are having greenhouses in villages. Epi Angba, a local, who grows spinach, lettuce, bok choy, green beans, cucumber and zucchini in her farmland, is one among many others to experience change.
“Before having the greenhouse, our diet was very poor and not so varied. We ate a lot of Thukpa (Tibetan soup) with potatoes and a few herbs we collected in the mountains, and this for the whole year,” says Angba adding; “Now we can eat zucchini, cauliflower and beans at almost any time of year. I have already planted seeds twice in my greenhouse since last April.”
Since this was the first year they grew vegetables with support of the UNDP Nepal funded project the locals this year mostly ate them with family and gave them to neighbors. “Next year, we plan to eat them but also sell them to guest houses when tourists come back for trekking.”
About GEF-SGP
UNDP’s GEF Small Grants Programme (GEF-SGP) works with local communities in developing countries, including Nepal, to achieve global environmental benefits by addressing their local needs. Funded by GEF, the programme provides grants upto US$ 50,000 to civil socieity organisations or community-based organisation for initiatives geared at conservation of biodiversity, mitigation of climate change, reduction of land degradation, protection of international waters and elimination of hazardous chemicals. The project believes that that environmental degradation such as the destruction of ecosystems and the species that depend upon them, increasing levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, pollution of international waters, land degradation and the spread of persistent organic pollutants are life-threatening challenges that endanger us all. However, poor and vulnerable communities –GEF-SGP’s primary stakeholders- are most at risk because they depend on access to natural resources for their livelihoods and often live in fragile ecosystems. The community in Samagaun are among those vulnerable ones who have been working together with us to improve food security while also conserving the biodiversity.
Photos: Margot Clavier
