Nepal’s unescapable trap of migration, farming and climate change

“WE DON’T GET rain on time anymore,” said Purna Rana, a 51-year-old farmer in Sathikola village in mid-western Nepal. It was the middle of November 2023 and the winter chill was beginning to set in. “The summers are hotter and winters are colder each year,” he continued. “Last winter, I lost my tomatoes to a combination of mosaic virus, white flies and extreme cold.” Rana has been fighting all these threats even as extreme weather conditions exacerbate farming risks every year. 

Rana was not always a farmer. He went to India to find work in 1991, when he was just 19. He trained as a radio repairman and electrician and shuttled for work between Shimla, Mumbai, Delhi and numerous small towns between these cities. After 21 years as a migrant, he returned to Nepal in 2012. He first planned to use his experience as a radio repairman to provide for his family, which included two school-going children. He made the hopeful but ill-considered move of opening a radio repair shop in his village. “How many radios do you think this village had?” he asked. Even the handful it had were soon made redundant by cheap mobile phones that doubled as radios.

Rana knew little about farming at the time, but a lack of options made him turn his full attention to the 1.5 acres or so of land in his possession – a large holding compared to the average in Nepal. He got a new electricity connection, installed a water pump and laid pipes for irrigation. The pump drew water from the Bheri, a major tributary of the Karnali River. In a country of many rainfed farms, Rana’s enterprise, combined with a location close to a river, pulled him into a relatively resource-rich agricultural bracket. But it cost him money – about NPR 1.5 lakh, or USD 1690 at the time – and the electricity rates are also high, not to mention the numerous other costs Rana incurs to continue farming.

“Migration, agriculture and climate change are closely interrelated in Nepal,” said Nilambar Badal, a labour migration expert at the Law and Policy Forum for Social Justice in Kathmandu. Agriculture in Nepal is characterised primarily by smallholder subsistence farming. About 70 percent of landholdings are of less than one hectare, with the average parcel size just 0.19 hectares. With only 54 percent of the total cultivable land area under irrigation, crop productivity is low. People dependent on agriculture, particularly in western Nepal, are among the poorest in the country.

Agriculture is the mainstay for roughly two-thirds of all Nepalis, engaging 4.13 million of the country’s 6.67 million households – but farming generates only a third of Nepal’s GDP. Almost half of all households in the country have a family member working abroad or returned from abroad. In 2023 alone, over 800,000 Nepalis went abroad to work – a figure approaching three percent of the country’s population of 29 million. As Amina Maharjan, a specialist on livelihoods and migration at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), explained, “Migration in Nepal is economic and is driven by a lack of opportunities.”

The large majority of migrants return to Nepal years or sometimes decades after working abroad as most destination countries do not allow them to settle permanently. “When they return, they depend on agriculture for lack of choice,” Badal said, adding that many of them have some land since Nepal’s is largely an agrarian economy. Studies have shown that one-fifth of returning migrants take up work in agriculture, forestry and fisheries. Research conducted since the Covid-19 pandemic began in early 2020 indicates a continued high interest in agriculture among current, returning and aspiring migrants. Half the migrants surveyed for one study planned to engage in agriculture upon returning, and more than a third of aspiring migrants saw agriculture as their fall-back option if the pandemic disrupted their plans for employment abroad.

Climate change is putting already fragile agricultural livelihoods in Nepal at further risk. According to a report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, about 90 percent of current crop losses in Nepal are due to weather or meteorological events such as temperature increases, as well as climatic hazards such as erratic rainfall, droughts and floods. “Every year we now have extreme events, droughts, uneven rainfall or snowfall,” Maharjan said. Climate change has regularly triggered internal displacement or mass migration in Nepal in recent years.

“Nobody wants to leave home to begin with,” Rana said. “But returnees never find peace.” Climate change played its part in Rana’s loss of his tomato crop in 2023. Rising temperatures increase the range of pests such as the whiteflies that attacked the crop, and also improve their survivability and adaptability. Each degree of temperature rise can cause anything from a ten percent to a 25 percent decrease in tomato yields due to insect pests. Already weakened by pest attacks, Rana’s crop succumbed to a bout of extreme cold. 

Also in 2023, in neighbouring India, there was a nationwide shortage of tomatoes, resulting in a massive percentage increase in tomato prices. Major tomato-growing regions such as Karnataka and Maharashtra were hit by viruses, which devastated crops and affected the quality and quantity of tomatoes produced. This even prompted major restaurant chains like McDonald’s to temporarily remove tomatoes from their menus. Rana thought that if he could have somehow salvaged his crop, he could have made a tidy profit. But his farm, like so many others, was not climate resilient.