The introduction of oil palm to the Peren district has brought with it a slew of environmental and social problems, including depleting soils, water shortages, the use of harmful chemicals, rapidly increasing labour costs and shifts in land tenure and ownership. The near-complete lack of institutional support for farmers has made oil palm cultivation a loss-making proposition. What has played out in Tenning Block (see Part 1) is now being repeated across the Peren and Niuland districts.
At an oil palm plantation of around 12 hectares near Jalukie, taken up by a church council in 2017, its spokesperson said they owned the land and the State Agriculture Department convinced them to plant oil palm. He said, “I feel ashamed to tell you about the small amounts of money given to clear the land, around Rs.20-30,000, for that was barely enough to buy fuel needed for the machines.” They were also given a tiller, a grass cutter and recently a tractor, he revealed.
“One of the difficulties we face is with the issue of maintenance. It has proved to be very expensive”, he said. “We know that the plants require more water. We have not given extra irrigation as required, as we do not have a well. Around 400 plants have died due to fire, insects and rats. Some of the saplings dried up. Of the 2,000 saplings initially planted in 2017, we had to replace the plants that died and after doing that, we currently have around 1,700 plants that are still alive,” he said.
This experience reveals that State encouragement and some support that came in the beginning, have been waning and that subsidies have been substantially reduced. While farmers struggle with maintenance issues, it is entirely their effort that prevents plantations from deteriorating. But that effort is costing the organisation Rs 1 lakh annually at the very least, which includes initial land clearance and one-time weeding.
Frustrated by the lack of company guidance and government support the church representative said, “No official has come here yet. Since nothing much has happened to address our needs, we wanted to uproot the oil palm plants. We approached the Agriculture Department and told them that we wanted to cut it down and clear it away from our land, but they told us, ‘Why do you want to cut, it’s gold’.”
The farmers have no idea how to manage the harvest of their crop; no training has been provided by the company and no one seems to know where the collection centre is located, who will pick up the harvest and what price will be paid for the fresh fruit bunches.
“We are hoping that the involvement of Godrej will ease things. We are not optimistic. Things are unpredictable. We have to do what the Agriculture Department says. They tell us to do things but they are not hands-on. There is apprehension over how to go forward. We have made investments for the past six years and it is difficult to remove oil palm now after so much time and effort. We have not used chemical fertilisers so there is a chance of restoring the land,” he said.
According to the church council representative a neighbouring farm in village Ngwalwa experimented with a pollinator, a newly introduced insect that flies across trees and covers a radius of 20 km which contributed to a good oil palm harvest. However, nobody knows the origins and rationale for such potentially harmful biological experimentation. When asked about this, the Sub-Divisional Officer who could have answered this question has been transferred, he reported.
The location of the mill to process the oil palm within 48 hours presents another challenge to Peren farmers. Currently, the only such mill catering to the Northeastern region is located at Kolasib in the Mizoram foothills. With poor road and transport conditions, delay in processing results in deterioration of the oil quality. Farmers then have to accept the price dictated by the company.
There is a proposal to set up another mill at Ganesh Nagar on the Assam-Nagaland border, close to Hebron, a camp of the NSCN-IM, a Naga political group. That area is still a distance of three hours from Jalukie, which is the collection centre for Peren.
A plantation owner in the Tening block of Peren, reiterates, “Small farmers cannot grow oil palm, it’s too risky. For two years we grew papaya in the oil palm plantations, but pesticides were required. We have recently sent truckloads of saplings to a nursery for distribution. The Central government people came to see and are satisfied with what we are doing. But money or supplies are not coming to me. I am subsidising the government,” he said.
An identical story emerges in a discussion with oil palm farmers in the recently created (2021) district of Niuland. These foothills, along with Wokha, Peren, and Chumoukedima are unique fertile lands that could be the organic bowl of Nagaland. Anything grows here without chemicals — turmeric, betel nut, lemons, fruits, paddy, mustard seeds, amongst others. All that they required was some heavy machinery like tractors to prepare the land, but there has been no government support for multi-cropping, the farmers said.
In 2017 oil palm was introduced in Niuland and the district has around 80 farmers who have established 1400 bighas (about 350 hectares) under oil palm cultivation. For the past two years, they have been represented by the Oil Palm Farmers Association. When abandoned by Sevasaiss, the livid farmers went to the Agriculture Dept and threatened to ‘call their bluff and file a case against them’.
The President of the Association, a Sumi tribal said, “We planted oil palm and after five years we got the first fruit bunches, but the original company was no longer around to buy the harvest. We have put in a lot of effort and expense to create these plantations and have borne an expenditure of up to Rs. 1.2 to 1.5 lakhs a year.”
As of November 2023, Godrej came and carried away 1,300 kg priced at Rs.10 per kg, which they said was fixed by the GOI. The total payment expected was Rs. 13,000, but at the time of the meeting, the payments had not materialised even after three months. “It is a huge loss, for in the initial meetings we were promised Rs.150 to 200 per kg by Sevasaiss and the Agriculture Department. The cost of maintenance is extremely high. For the past couple of years, we left the produce as it is because there was no collection. We are thinking of removing these plants but it needs a JCB and the cost is too much,” an Association office bearer said.
Irrigating the oil palm daily has become an insurmountable problem for the Niuland farmers. Earlier they pumped water from their fish ponds or the river, but now they have run out of money. They are no longer able to water the plants. Now, they say the trees are falling, and rodents are eating them. “If it was a few hundred trees it would still be okay, but it’s affecting thousands of trees,” a farmer testified.
The Niuland farmers have experimented with the pollinator, which they said is a weevil. “Despite using this pollinator, only the outer side of the seeds looks good. The inside, however, the kernel, which is the oil-bearing part of the fruit is not good”, they reported.
Given the existing situation on the ground, the prospects of a successful rollout of oil palm in Nagaland — one that brings benefits to farmers while still preserving soil and water quality — are grim. The lessons from Peren and Niuland must be communicated across the state so that informed decisions (not based simply on government or corporate promises) can be made by Nagaland’s farmers.
(This is the second of a two-part series)
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect EastMojo’s position.
Also Read | Oil palm in Nagaland: Broken promises and reneging companies – Pt 1