Mamit is a hilly district in Mizoram, home to around 8,000 people and situated approximately 110 kilometres from the state capital, Aizawl. For generations, its communities—primarily Mizo and Bru—have farmed this terrain through jhum, or shifting cultivation, supported by stable rainfall, low input costs, and little to no dependence on chemical fertilisers. Jhum is not simply a farming technique but a calendar, a community ritual, and a living repository of ecological knowledge passed down in families through generations.
Until a decade ago, this system worked. Rainfall arrived on time, harvests were reliable, and families grew enough to eat and store, with little need for chemical inputs. Then, around 2016-17, things started to change.
Over the last decade, the stability that jhum depended on began to erode. Rainfall became unpredictable, soil degradation increased, and the time of sowing and harvesting became unreliable. To compensate, farmers were forced to turn to chemical pesticides, primarily to manage weeds that had become increasingly difficult to control by hand, and fertilisers. These were inputs the system had rarely needed before, and were purchased by farmers themselves without government subsidy, though spray pumps were sometimes made available at a subsidised rate.
The farm calendar, once the community’s most reliable guide, began to break down. And with it came a threat farmers had not anticipated at a concerning frequency: rodent attacks on their fields.
Mizoram has three common bamboo varieties, each flowering at different intervals. One every five years, another every ten, and another every twenty years. When bamboo flowers, it fruits abundantly, triggering a rodent population explosion. Once the fruits are depleted, the rodents turn to the nearest available food source, which are the crops on farmers’ fields.
In 2025, the large-scale flowering of Bambusa tulda (locally known as Rawthing bamboo), which occurs every 48 years, intensified the attacks in Mizoram. But for farmers in Mamit, rodents are only part of a wider crisis of animals and insects damaging their crops at every stage of the farming cycle.
Around 800 jhum farmers, cultivating approximately 158 acres of land, have been affected. Farmers report annual losses of around INR 40,000. Those farming smaller plots of around 2 bigha are left with only 10 to 20 percent of their produce after an attack. The scale of damage was significant enough to put the state government on alert over a potential famine-like situation.
When crops are destroyed, farmers report the damage to the forest department. “When these wild animals destroy the crops, we report it to the forest department. However, even after reporting, it has not helped us, and the grievances have not been addressed properly. Every year, the forest department requests us to report these incidents, and we do— but still await any solutions”, says a farmer from Mamit.
For farming families, yield loss is not simply an agricultural statistic. It translates into food shortage, debt, and financial stress that does not end with the season but compounds quietly from one failed harvest to the next.
The plantation prescription
Faced with repeated crop failures, farmers in Mamit are shifting to alternative plantation crops including arecanut, rubber, and oil palm. These are often seen as more stable sources of income. The government occasionally provides seeds for rubber and oil palm, but support rarely extends beyond this initial input.
The shift comes with its own challenges. It requires long waiting periods before any income is generated, significant upfront financial investment, and technical knowledge that many jhum farmers do not yet possess. And it is compressing the land itself. As one farmer explains: “I have returned to this particular jhum area after three years to start cultivation again. After one harvest, I plan to convert the area into a garden, as there is not enough land left for jhum cultivation and all the community cultivation areas have already been used up.”
No way out
The shift to plantation crops has not delivered the stability it promised. Arecanut, rubber, and oil palm are equally vulnerable to climate-induced extreme weather, which reduces their yield. And rodents, the same problem that devastated jhum fields, also damage young plantation plants and stored produce.
The result is that farmers who managed to make the difficult transition—investing time, money, and effort into a new system—find themselves facing the same crop loss, financial stress, and livelihood insecurity they were trying to escape. Plantations alone are not a solution.
Farmers in Mamit have begun approaching the forest department for compensation for crop failures. But many do not know what else to demand or whom to ask. The occasional request that does reach an official is modest: help with oil palm processing or guidance on next steps. A long-term plan for mitigation and adaptation that actually involves these communities does not exist yet.
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Know more
- Read more about the impact of climate change on crops, food security, and smallholder livelihoods.
- Read more about how climate change is impacting Mizoram’s ecosystem.
