The Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR and World Agroforestry (ICRAF) joined forces in 2019, leveraging a combined 65 years’ experience in research on the role of forests and trees in solving critical global challenges.
Internal migration in India is a coping strategy for families facing low agricultural yields. Improvements in farming can lead to more stable healthy lives.
Migration in India is is one of the largest movements of people in the world: more than a third of India’s population, about 450 million people, were internal migrants as of the last census.
The migration is largely of two types, according to UNESCO: long-term and short-term or seasonal/circular migration.
The State of Odisha in India experiences marked circular migration. Eleven of its 30 districts are ‘migration prone’, experiencing a yearly outflow to more prosperous states, such as Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat. In the dry winter season, hundreds of thousands of farming families leave home to labour at brick kilns and on construction sites. To give a sense of the scale of out-migration from Odisha — circular or permanent — over half a million people had returned home by 14 June 2020 owing to the COVID-19 lockdown.
They have reason to leave in the first place. Bolangir and Nuapada are Odisha’s most migration-prone districts. In the nutritional ranking of India’s 599 districts, they rank 531 and 589. More than 60% of women and children under five are anaemic. Over 35% of the population migrate each year.
With agriculture faltering and incomes low at home — an average of INR 42,000–48,000 (≈ USD 564–648) per household — migration offers the positive prospect of almost doubled annual earnings and an escape from food, nutrition and income insecurity.
‘The movement of people within a country results in a more efficient allocation of human resources to sectors and regions where they are better utilized,’ the World Bank states. But in the case of the Odisha migrants, the trek and backbreaking work exact a toll on their undernourished frames. Debts still build up. Children still progress poorly.
Alternatives exist to migration, however. And life has begun to change for some families under a project called, Enabling smallholders to produce and consume more nutritious food through Agroforestry system in Odisha, or Odisha Agroforestry Project for short.
The project was launched in Bolangir and Nuapada in 2018 with funding from the State Government, which knew what it needed. Backed by research, the project began offering alternatives to farmers who were technology-deprived and resource-poor at home but who, if they migrated, faced being possibly more malnourished, still poor and often harshly treated.
The partnership between World Agroforestry (ICRAF) and Odisha’s Department of Watershed & Soil Conservation identified main drivers of seasonal migration as dwindling returns from agriculture because of frequent droughts and shortage of water leading to just one crop a year.
‘Migration and malnutrition are both linked with regular failure of crops and low income from agriculture, especially for marginal and small-scale farmers, which often leads to abandoning of agricultural land,’ said Rajendra Choudhary who, along with Atul Dogra, are the leading ICRAF scientists for the Odisha Agroforestry Project.
The project began to lay out a new vision of agriculture to enable smallholders to produce and consume more nutritious food and earn more from their farming. It enrolled 3200 migrating families in three categories: those who rest their land in winter months when they are away; those who no longer cultivate their land; and the landless.
Results were quick to come.
Tirtha and Nuadei Bariha and their family of five were enabled to take up agroforestry and to crop around solar panels, a system called agro-voltaics. They ended 15 years of migration to Andhra Pradesh and Kerala.
‘I have been able to clear all our debts and our living conditions have significantly improved. We need not migrate for a living anymore,’ said Tirtha Bariha.
In another of several project interventions that cumulatively support reduction in migration, Balabhadra and Ajodhya Mallik were provided with high-quality fruit tree seedlings, which they intercropped with watermelons that flourished thanks to a project-supported well. Giving agriculture a second chance, they have not migrated for the first time in eight years.
”Fellow migrants, do not migrate to face harsh conditions and still earn poorly,’ advised Ajodhya. ‘Adopt new technologies and work on your farms for yourselves,’ said Balabhadra.
The project will run to 2021 or possibly 2022. With such hopeful stories already, this should be adequate to see whether its premise holds true over the longer term. Can improving agriculture, particularly through the integration of trees on farms, bring in as much or more money than farming families can earn from migrating?
‘We understand that annual earnings of INR 60,000–70,000 (≈ USD 822–960) at home could save families from these sufferings of migration,’ said ICRAF South Asia director, Javed Rizvi. ‘We are seeing that this is possible if farmers adopt the techniques introduced by the project coupled with capacity development and handholding during initial years.’
Tirtha and Nuadei Bariha’s trees started fruiting within two years and the family was able to surpass that threshold and earn INR 85,007 (≈ USD 1149) in the second year of the project. The overall produce from the family’s agroforestry system, including fruit, rice and vegetables, outperformed their expected income from migration by 18 percent.
The Malliks were able to earn INR 84,858 (≈ USD 1147) from the project’s interventions with income from fruit sales, which has not yet peaked.
But the benefits have not just come from trees. Other interventions are sensitization, village training and distribution of seeds for protein-rich rice and other biofortified high-yielding staples. The area has also seen the introduction of, and financial support for, technologies such as hydrogel, sub-surface irrigation and solar panels to pump water year-round.
A crucial intervention that is part of the project’s exit strategy is the extensive training of local youth to become ‘Krishi Vaniki Mitra’ (KVMs/Friends of Agroforestry). Their role is to ‘handhold’ farmers, mobilise them to adopt new practices and extend technical support. even after the project closes.
KVMs are literate young men with hands-on training in agroforestry who live and work in their own communities. The hope is that they will remain in their villages as knowledge sources.
‘We are happy that at an approximate investment equivalent to USD 780 per household, the project is offering a scalable approach for a transformative change and possible liberation from distress migration,’ said Ravi Prabhu, director, Innovation, Investment and Impact at CIFOR-ICRAF.
For project families, the improvement they have experienced goes beyond the material. Migration comes with stigma and psychological distress.
‘We are now respected members of the community and our children are no longer exposed to migration,’ said Tirtha Bariha.
World Agroforestry (ICRAF) is a centre of scientific and development excellence that harnesses the benefits of trees for people and the environment. Knowledge produced by ICRAF enables governments, development agencies and farmers to utilize the power of trees to make farming and livelihoods more environmentally, socially and economically sustainable at multiple scales. ICRAF is one of the 15 members of the CGIAR, a global research partnership for a food-secure future. We thank all donors who support research in development through their contributions to the CGIAR Fund.