Rural livelihoods at risk: how Nepalese farmers cope with food insecurity

Since the early 1990s, Nepal has changed from a net exporter to a net importer of food. Nearly half of Nepal's districts have become deficient in food. The situation is most serious for peripheral mountain regions of the Middle Hills. The paper concentrates on food deficient village communities in fragile mountain tracts of Nepal. It is based on household surveys in six peripheral mountain villages. More than fifty percent of all households are not even self-sufficient in food for six months in a year. The project then focuses on the coping strategies of the mountain farmers which aim at bridging this gap in food supply. The analysis reveals highly diverse, complex, and innovative strategies which require high degrees of mobility and activity. There is a general tendency that these strategies are increasingly oriented towards markets. It becomes clear that the growing tendency towards external linkages offers new potentialities, but, at the same time, new risks for the mountain population. The project therefore examines the major determinants which make specific coping strategies more or less successful. In addition to caste and ethnicity, household structures (including work participation patterns, gender composition, age structure, and health status) emerge as most decisive factors. Despite all efforts, the majority of the mountain population, nevertheless, is severely undernourished. For an increasing proportion of the village people, survival has becomes a permanent crisis.