Still Tilling: Local Farmer’s Page

Recipe for slowing down out-migration: a TMI video

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TMI video

In Nepal’s hill and mountain communities, food insecurity and lack of income sources continue to drive thousands of young men abroad as migrant workers in low-paid and often dangerous jobs. Women and children are left behind in villages where vast areas of agricultural land are left fallow as nobody is home to farm it. Out-migration is transforming many hill and mountain villages into communities in gradual disintegration! But in recent years, TMI – the Mountain Institute – has succeeded in slowing down this process in some districts. Their recipe? Training farmers in production of medical and aromatic plants (MAPs) …

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Survey: the economy is getting more urbanised

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Urbanisation stands out at night: Kathmandu Valley make up almost 25 pct. of the national economy

Nepal’s economy is becoming steadily more urbanised, according to the government’s Economic Survey for 2014-15. Indeed, cities and towns make up 33.1 pct. of the national economy – Kathmandu Valley a staggering 23.4 pct. alone – and VDCs adjacent to the urban areas account for an additional 30 pct. of the economy. In other words, […]

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Seed imports – and how farmers lost their “seed security”

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Fifteen years ago, a young Nepalese student of agriculture – N. P. Timsina – went to districts in the Mountains, Hills and Terai to study seed security. His motivation? Well, seed security, Timsina wrote back then, is where all food security begins! For centuries, local farmers in the districts that Timsina visited maintained their own seed supply. Cucumber, beans, cawliflower, as well as rice, maize and all other crops were cultivated, not with seeds bought on the market but with local, home-grown seeds. That meant a high degree of seed self-sufficiency. But in the late 1990s this whole system was changing…

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Nepal imports 25% of its vegetables – NEAT solution

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Nepal imports 25% of its vegetables – NEAT solution

USAID – a major donor in agriculture in Nepal – operates a programme on a wholly different level than the limited organic sector. 25 percent of the vegetables on the urban market in Nepal are imported from abroad, mainly from India, and to achieve greater self-sufficiency, USAID advocates, it is crucial to improve the “value […]

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Going organic – a spreading idea in Nepal?

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Once upon a time, all farming in Nepal was purely organic. But over the last one or two decades, a significant commercialization in the more productive farm areas has taken place. Population and income levels in Kathmandu and major towns have been rising; the number of consumers who are buying not least vegetables has increased; […]

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