TWO weeks before I saw the road that connected the village of Kelaginakeri to the town of Sirsi in the east, I had arrived in this hamlet after walking up the western slope of the Ghats. My circuitous route involved changing two buses and a four-hour walk up the ghats. I was on a hilltop doing fieldwork when I saw the dusty road. On asking my companion Parma Gowda where the road led to he replied that this was the road to Sirsi, on which a bus came twice a day! I did not know if I should laugh at my folly or rejoice at my luck. I felt both emotions in full measure and happy that I had found my research site which would take a few hours rather than a whole day to get to.

I spent the next four years living and studying forest use in Kelaginakeri. Located in the Western Ghats, Kelaginkeri is a mosaic of forest and agriculture that has been produced by centuries of human use and management. The village is majority Brahmin and Kare Vokkaliga Gowda families almost all of whom grew the palm Areca catechu, the seeds of which were sold as betel nuts for the supari market.

The area has always been part of a long history of commodity markets linked as it was with the betel nut and spice trade for centuries. And yet in talking about the Western Ghats, conservationists often invoke images of remote landscapes and forests. I had come here to complicate the predominant idea of conserving nature as if people did not matter. I wanted to challenge the idea that people’s use of forests is ecologically degrading and therefore restricting forest use is an essential step to conserving biodiversity.

 

I had begin to hear urban conservationists and forest department officials portray the harvest of fruits of Garcinia gummigatta locally known as Uppage in the Uttara Kannada district as examples of rapacious harvest that was leading to the ‘extinction of the species’. Such a conclusion flew in the face of everything I had read about the harvest of non-timber forest products (NTFPs) in the global literature. Writing in the journal Nature, Charles Peters and colleagues showed that NTFP collection could help in conserving the Amazon as NTFP collection was an alternative to deforestation by providing local communities income that was sustained and long term.

This inspired a global boom in studies promoting the harvest of NTFPs and yet in India influential scientists were proscribing the collection of NTFPs by people who were desperately poor and often landless. The ecological literature from around the world concluded that what mattered was not whether fruits were harvested but that the trees and forest were left standing. The greatest ecological impact was if the trees were cut and not that fruits were harvested. Yet neither the forest administration nor elite wildlife conservationists were heeding these conclusions.

 

I wanted to get evidence for whether harvest of fruits affected the ecology of the species in the Western Ghats so we could have data that was more specific to our region. I chose a site where active commercial harvest of the endemic tree species was occurring. The harvesting was being done in a range of forest types such as leased forests as well as in the more open access reserved forests.

As in the rest of the country, the forests of the Sirsi Division had been appropriated by the British for timber extraction. The reservation of these forests by the colonial state deprived the areca farmers of their access to forests from where they sourced leaf manure as mulch for their areca gardens. They petitioned the British government for access to the forests. Their upper caste status as well as the commercial value of the crop won the farmers access to forests in the ratio of nine acres of forest for every acre of areca that they owned. These patches of forest, referred to as soppina betta, were leased to areca farmers on a 99-year lease beginning in the 1880s.

It was unprecedented that local people had been able to convince the colonial administration to give them forest land on lease for agriculture even as forest dwellers in other parts of India were losing their communal land and rights to the forest. Vasant Saberwal and Sharachchandra Lele have argued that the Havyaka Brahmins of the district used their elite status and their institutions to gain usufruct rights to vast stretches of forest. This was also around the time that British and Scottish planters were being granted forest land for conversion to coffee and tea plantations all along the Western Ghats.

Uppage has been customarily used by Havyaka Brahmins for the extraction of cooking oil from the seed. The oil was known for its unique taste but many people told me that the regular use of the oil gave them joint pains and therefore was only used on special occasions. The dried rind of the Uppage fruit is however a major culinary ingredient in Kerala and Kodagu where it is used to sour fish and pork curries. In Kerala where it is known as Kodampuli, the smoke dried rind is added to fish curries and in Kodagu where it is called Kachampuli, a vinegar is extracted from the rind and used in their signature Pandi (pork) curry.

 

The Uppage fruit has been bringing smiles of satisfaction to the faces of fish and pork eaters in the southern Western Ghats for centuries but it was a more recent international development that brought some cheer to Uttara Kannada forest dwellers. This was the discovery that the Hydroxy Citric Acid (HCA) in the rind of the fruit was effective in human weight loss. Neutraceutical companies jumped onto this bandwagon and the market for HCA derived from Uppage resulted in the increased harvest of fruits for the international neutraceutical market.

Even as the hype created around HCA drove the markets, there appeared studies that sought to disprove these claims. A randomized clinical trial of HCA use published in the ‘Journal of the American Medical Association’, showed no difference in weight loss between a control group and the HCA treatment group. This certainly depressed the demand for HCA but did not wipe it out completely as companies found new ways to sell the product which kept the demand for the product up for more than a decade after the clinical study.

As soon as the monsoon breaks over the Western Ghats Uppage harvest activity commences in the Uttara Kannada forests. In Kelaginkeri I found that small farmers would collect from the nearest forest area and richer farmers would even employ people from outside the village to harvest the fruit for them. The high price of the fruit made this profitable. Elsewhere in the district I often saw groups of collectors from the coastal zone travel up to the Ghats and camp for days in the reserve forest collecting the fruit and drying the rind on makeshift wood fire ovens that they had built for the purpose. All of this collection was in the monsoon.

 

For many people Uppage was a significant additional income and these state owned forests came alive as sites of value for many people in the district. Uppage became a byword for additional income. The question is who benefited the most and it turns out that the richer farmers who owned land and soppina betta earned more than the poorer small farmers. This was contrary to my expectations as much of the literature that I had read claimed that NTFPs were the most beneficial for poorer farmers. The difference in earnings boiled down to whether people had rights of access to the forest and fruit.

The conditions that allowed rich collectors to wait for the fruits to ripen and therefore earn more from the higher price of ripe fruit rind, combined with their ability to exclude others from the forests that they controlled as individual lease holders. This has lessons for the governance of Western Ghats forests that I will return to after a brief description of the ecology of Uppage in the forests of Sirsi.

The Uppage tree flowers in early summer and the flowers are pollinated by tiny weevils that also pollinate areca flowers that are in bloom at this time. The Uppage fruits begin to ripen just as the monsoon breaks over the Western Ghats in June. The average fruit weighs about 80 gms with three quarters of the fruit being the rind and the rest pulp and seeds. The fruits ripen on the tree in a staggered manner between June and August with the result that only a small portion of fruits ripen on any given day. This is an evolutionary strategy to attract mammals such as civets and primates who will eat the pulp of the fruit and discard the rind and seed, thereby ensuring that the seed gets dispersed.

By making only a small portion of the fruits available for animals to eat the tree ensures that most of the seeds are dispersed. This staggered fruiting is key to the ecology of the species as the civet cat that eats the pulp and the seed will then excrete seeds far from the tree thereby dispersing seeds to new areas. I found that seeds that passed through the gut of animals tend to be transported far from the parent tree and thus have a higher chance of survival.

 

Animals are not interested in the rind, while humans are. This simple partitioning of the resource ensures that people get their rind, animals the sugar rich pulp, and the tree gets its seeds into new areas where they will germinate after a long dormancy of seven months. The relatively large seed ensures that the seedlings can stay in the shaded wet forest habitat for a long time until the requisite conditions for growth, such as better light, are met.

If harvesters wait for the rind to be thrown to the ground by animals or for the ripe fruit to fall on the ground, then the ecological life history processes of the tree are not affected, nor animals deprived of nutrition – everyone benefits. But sadly this does not occur in the open access state controlled forests. The forest department which controls access to the forests awards the contract for the trade in fruits to contractors who then buy the fruit from anyone who is able to harvest it. During peak harvest season, people from near and far came to the forests to collect Uppage. As all fruits are not ripe on the trees at the same time, people collect a mix of ripe and unripe fruits even though the unripe fruits fetch a far lower price. The harvest of unripe fruits is not conducive for the long-term regeneration of the species as seeds are not dispersed and the population growth might therefore be affected.

 

This adverse harvest in state forests is a result of the lack of local rights to the forest for people in these areas. If Gram Sabhas were given greater control over these forests, there would be better oversight of the harvest and benefit sharing regimes. The fact that these forests are controlled by the forest department, and that villages do not have the ability to lay down rules of harvest, has resulted in a rush to get fruits, even if unripe and of low value. Many people living in surrounding villages who I spoke to lamented that due to the high price they did not have the ability to exclude people who were coming to these forests from far away areas. These forest had become truly open access and this lack of decentralized control was resulting in the harvest of unripe fruits.

The presence of Soppina betta offered me an experimental system to test the question if local control gives better ecological outcomes. Soppina betta provides an extreme case of local control given that individual households control these small patches. I found that farmers collected fallen rind and fruits from trees in these forests and that the number of seeds and seedlings in these patches were higher than in open access forests. Although these are not ‘commons’ by any stretch of the imagination, the mere ability to decide when and how fruits would be collected resulted in more ecologically benign harvest.

Even as soppina bettas are an inequitable land use, as these are under individual control and in no way reflect common property regimes, we could use these results to argue that more decentralized governance systems would produce more socially equitable and ecological sustainable outcomes than the current centralized forest governance that is practiced in reserved forests, wildlife sanctuaries and national parks across India. Due to lack of local management, forests are being invaded by weeds, converted into plantations or diverted for mining and infrastructure by a state that is more interested in economic outcomes than in social or ecological ones. The evidence for adverse ecological and social consequences of centralized systems of governance is now too large to ignore.

 

As an ecologist grappling with issues of forest condition and access, I became aware of the intersecting nature of these issues through Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom’s work on common property regimes as a response to centralized state control on the one hand, and private property on the other. My work in Sirsi showed me that both the state’s centralized and farmer’s private control of forest resulted in adverse ecological and inequitable social outcomes. The commons approach that Ostrom spent her life documenting and analyzing is only a first step to a more equitable and sustainable future. It is when we combine this institutional analysis with the understanding of the political economic reasons for continued state control, might we begin to transform forest governance in the Western Ghats.

While the basis for state control of forests in the past was timber, today it is carbon. Forests are now becoming valued for their role as carbon sinks. International climate mitigation programmes such as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) tends to promote greater centralization as governments seek to monitor and report their carbon sequestration goals in order to meet performance levels under international agreements. There are therefore huge challenges confronting local attempts to gain secure access and right to forests.

 

The most glaring example of state apathy to granting local people rights to the forest is the dismal progress on the implementation of the Forest Right Act in the 15 years since its legislation by parliament. This progressive act is aimed at giving forest dwellers cultivation and community forest rights and is considered the harbinger of the democratization of forest governance in India.

To make matters worse for poor and marginal forest dwellers, wildlife conservationists have petitioned against the Forest Rights Act in the Supreme Court and the hearings are ongoing. As part of their submissions to the court conservationists have cherry-picked and manipulated evidence to make the case that NTFP collection is bad for the forest. This ignores published research in India from wildlife areas and reserve forests that have appeared in the years preceding the petition. It looks to me that the route to a more democratic governance of the Western Ghats and forests elsewhere in India is going to be a lot more circuitous and challenging than we imagined. The struggle to keep alive the entwined social, cultural, ecological idea of the Western Ghats is going to be a long one.