North-East forests under siege

THE North-East has the last remaining dense and virgin forests in India, and these are falling prey to unrelenting destruction through commercial exploitation. Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Manipur and Tripura are in a race to hand over large tracts of land to private contractors to grow oil palm and manufacture palm oil, replacing relatively expensive imports.

While the government claims that these plantations are only using degraded land or “Jhum” (slash and burn) residual plots, there are reliable reports that the region’s rich and variegated forests are being cut down to make way for ecologically destructive oil palm plantations. Under the National Mission on Edible Oils — Oil Palm (NMEO-OP), adopted in 2021, the current national cumulative acreage under oil palm of 640,000 hectares (ha) will be scaled up to 1 million ha by 2029 and the total potential footprint is estimated at 2.8 million ha.

Currently, the acreage is largely concentrated in the southern states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, but further expansion is likely to come from the North-East. According to official figures, the oil palm acreage in the region is 68,324 hectares, with Mizoram in the lead with 30,000 ha and Arunachal Pradesh with 25,000 ha. The immediate target for 2026 is 92,543 ha. The longer-term target for the North-East is 962,000 ha.

Under the NMEO-OP, the Union government is aggressively promoting oil palm cultivation and processing in the North-East through a public-private template. The mission pays Rs 20,000/ha for plantations using domestic seedlings and Rs 29,000/ha for those using imported seedlings.

After planting, there is a gestation period of four years before the first yield, during which a subsidy of Rs 50,000/ha is payable. There is also a guaranteed floor price of Rs 15,400 per tonne for the output. Thanks to such generosity, state governments are actively plotting and allocating tracts of land to private contractors to grow oil palm. The land thus allocated is ostensibly degraded, but peer-reviewed studies tell a different story.

Using satellite surveys, Global Forest Watch, an international NGO, claims that five northeastern states (Assam, Mizoram, Arunachal, Nagaland and Manipur) accounted for about 60% of India’s total tree-cover loss between 2001 and 2023. It was found that the Dampa Tiger Reserve in Mizoram had been encroached upon for the planting of oil palm.

There are three major companies engaged in oil palm cultivation in the North-East. These are Patanjali, Godrej Agrovet and 3F Oil Palm Private Ltd, which is already a major player in South India.

How have we come to this when government figures claim that India’s forest cover is 24.5% of its geographical area and is expanding? In the latest Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) that the government has submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the target for increasing the carbon sink in the form of forests is to be raised to 3.5-4 billion tonnes of oil equivalent between 2031 and 2035, on the back of the expected achievement, ahead of schedule, of the previous target of a 2.5-3 billion tonnes for 2026-30. These figures are with reference to the base year of 2005. The 4 billion-tonne figure translates into an additional forest cover of 18.7 million ha according to the methodology used by the Forest Survey of India (FSI). Is this realistic?

For years now, the FSI has been using a definition of forest which does not conform to international standards. It defines a forest as an acreage of at least 1 ha with a tree density of 10/ha and with a tree size of at least 2 metres on maturity. More importantly, this covers orchards, bamboo and oil palm plantations, which would not normally fall in the category of forest. This is what enables the State to pass off an oil palm plantation which has replaced a virgin forest as “no change in land use” and “no loss of forest”.

There is more. The Forest (Conservation) Amendment Act, 2023, restricted the definition of forests only to those which were registered in government land records, as per the Indian Forest Act of 1927 or officially entered in government records on or after October 25, 1980. These records left out of purview forests on tribal lands or those maintained as community forests.

This was the case with forests in the North-East, which were not registered during the colonial period, and this continued after Independence. However, a Supreme Court ruling in 1996 protected forests on tribal and community land by bringing them under India’s forest conservation laws. The court held that all forests that match the dictionary definition of “forest”, regardless of who may own them and irrespective of whether they were officially recorded, are entitled to protection by the State.

It is this ruling which is being sought to be changed by the amendment of 2021, since most of the forests in the North-East do not figure as such in official records. They do not qualify as “forest” at all. It is through this unseemly sleight of hand that the oil palm story in the region has taken wing.

On a public interest litigation filed by conservationists, the Supreme Court has put a temporary halt to all commercial exploitation in forest areas, as spelt out in its earlier judgement. The government is contesting this decision. The development imperative and the national security compulsion are being put out to defend the amendment, but they lack credibility.

One hopes that the court will stand its ground because the little that is left of our invaluable forest resources belongs to the generations to come. The Union government seeks to revive ancient Indian culture and traditions and yet seems disconnected from the ancient wisdom which considers our forests to be sacred and sees divinity in trees, mountains and rivers. The tattered garment of green that still covers Mother Nature in the hills and valleys of the North-East must never be violated.

As long as a tree growing in the forest has less value than when it is cut down and sold as timber, forests will continue to be ravaged.

The writer served as the PM’s Special Envoy for Climate Change