Subsistence Strategies in the Modern World

Subsistence Strategies in the Modern World

The Unesco programme on Man and the Biosphere (MAB) brought together an expert panel in Salzburg, Austria, in 1973 to discuss the impact of human activities on mountain ecosystems. As a part of the final report of the discussions the panel characterised mountain regions as those in which there exists an altitudinal gradient of barometric pressure, radiation, temperature and precipitation. This gradient results in vertical zonation of soils, flora, fauna and ecosystem types. Accordingly, man's way of life, his habitat and land ways and exploitation patterns, are differentiated vertically (Unesco 1973).

The Unesco project and many other initiatives such as the symposium on Himalayan, Andean and Alpine mountain ecosystems organised by the American Anthropological Association in 1973 and published in Human Ecology, the Munich Conference on Development Problems in Mountain Environments, 1974, IUCN'S Conference on the Management of High Mountain Resources, held in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1976, the International Symposium on the Earth Sciences, Ecology, and Ethnology of the Himalayas at Paris (CNRS, 1977), the United Nations University Project on Highland-Lowland Interaction Systems in 1978, the inauguration of the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) in Kathmandu in 1983 under the aegis of Unesco, and so on, were a response to the expression of great concern in the late 1950s and 1960s about progressive environmental degradation and the realisation that 'all is not well in the mountain regions of the world' (Ives 1985).

There was a spate of studies of Alpine, circum-Alpine, Andean and Himalayan mountain ecosystems during the past three decades, with growing interest in mountain environments and the human populations inhabiting them. Most of these studies were focused on the subsistence strategies employed by mountain inhabitants for survival in rugged and inhospitable regions.

Despite the strenuous and hazardous conditions, the mountains have a mystical attraction for humankind, so much so that a sizeable number, adding up to a tenth of the world's population, lives in the mountain regions. The Himalaya are the most popular and are inhabited by nearly 120 million people over a 2,500 km stretch from Afghanistan to Myanmar. Because of this demographic reality and because of the distinctive subsistence strategies of mountain populations, their comparative and analytical study became a major focus of attention (Brush et al. 1974; Rhoades et al. 1975; Hoffpauir 1978; Goldstein and Messerschmidt 1980; Guillet 1983). Most of these studies were in agreement with the vertical zonation of life support resources in mountain ecosystems as underlined by the Unesco project. However, since most studies were undertaken in the Nepal Himalaya, so far as the Himalayan ecosystem is concerned mention must be made of the pioneering study of Pant (1935) and recently that of Nitya Nand and Kumar (1989) in the Uttarakhand region of the Indian Himalaya. S.D. Pant's Social Economy of the Himalayans is, as a matter of fact, a path-breaking endeavour employing the ecosystem approach in analysing the subsistence strategies of the people inhabiting the Kumaon ...