Living on a mountain

Due to the indisputable advent of ‘climate change’, survival on the mountains is getting tougher by the day.

Mountain living is not, despite the surreal vision that city and plains dwellers dream on of, an easy matter at the best of times and due to the indisputable advent of ‘climate change’, survival is getting tougher by the day.

This year, for example, the laughingly called ‘pre-monsoon rains’ arrived in the form of a vicious storm on May 26 and interspersed with just a mere handful of dry days, monsoon rains — mostly in storm form — continue and are, according to meteorological forecasts, set to do so until the end of this month at least. Furthermore, temperatures have remained on the low side throughout — it was just 14 degrees centigrade at noon in Murree on September 12 — and have plummeted further with the first heavy snowfall of the winter season, turning the Pir Panjal mountains in Azad Kashmir completely white during the day of September 15.



While those suffering the heat of the ‘lowlands’ may relish the thought of seemingly never-ending cool, verging on cold, rains and even colder unseasonal snow, the knock-on effect on subsistence agriculture, as traditionally practised in mountain regions and on the environment as a whole, is no laughing matter.

Take something as basic as grass: as a result of wet conditions, grass grew rapidly all summer, the growth unnaturally tall and sappy and of a kind more deficient in necessary nutrients when it comes to animal fodder than is usual and now, in what has always been the height of the traditional grass cutting and drying season, the weather remains wet and by the time it is suitable for ‘haymaking’, the grass, way past its extremely poor ‘best’, will contain little food value aside from bulk. Mountain livestock is never well fed and the coming winter, whatever else it brings, will witness a drastic reduction in already borderline starvation animal husbandry as, even if subsistence farmers had adequate knowledge of livestock nutrition, they lack funds to purchase necessary feed.

Then there is the matter of agricultural food production, limited as it is in these areas: orchard fruits — basically apples, apricots, plums and pears — were devastated at blossom and then fruit set time due to bitterly cold winds and late snows at the tail end of March. This happened for the fourth year in a row, so harvestable crops were very small with little, if any, reaching the market which, in turn, adversely affected human nutrition and income. For the same weather related reasons, sowing of corn, beans, cucumbers, pumpkins, potatoes and tomatoes was delayed and before seedlings were properly established, they were decimated by hailstones. Those that survived struggled on through unprecedented rains only to be further depleted by fungal diseases such as blight.

With little homegrown fruit and vegetables on which to base their daily diet, the indigenous population has limped along by purchasing limited amounts of fresh edibles from local bazaars but not all can afford to do this on a regular basis and even those who can, are largely unable to stretch their budgets far enough, thanks to rabid inflation, to include the perceived luxury of fruit. The fact that prices, as always, were unreasonably high during the holy month of Ramazan, did nothing to help the situation.

Juggling meagre amounts of cash to buy food, pay for medicines to treat the high rate of chest infections associated with wet weather and poor diet, along with other basic necessities, leaves no money to buy gas, therefore trees, the lungs of the world and answer to climate change, are being cut for fuel wood and cooking purposes like never before. The cycle is vicious and somehow, must be broken.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 18^th, 2013.

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