by Richard S. Ehrlich
KATMANDU, Nepal -- Giant India's border blockade against tiny Nepal has prompted fuel-starved Nepalese to chop down their Himalayan forests, ruining the ecology and worsening future killer monsoon floods in India.
Copyright by Richard S. Ehrlich
Richard S. Ehrlich's Asia news, non-fiction book titled, "Hello My Big Big Honey!" plus hundreds of photographs are available at his website http://www.oocities.org/asia_correspondent
May 1989
India's Blockade of Nepal Ruins Himalayan Ecology
The spontaneous hatcheting of trees began on March 23 when India slammed shut all but two of land-locked Nepal's border crossings because their trade and transit treaty expired and both governments could not come to a fresh agreement.
As a result of the blockade, Nepal now suffers shortages of almost every item, including medicine, food, building materials and spare parts, plus humbler household goods such as sewing needles, radio batteries and other made-in-India necessities.
But it is Kathmandu's strict daily rationing of kerosene to each family which is prompting impoverished Nepalese and greedy businessmen to whip out their blades and slash down trees to burn for cooking fuel and -- along the icy mountains in the shadow of Mount Everest -- heat.
Here in the pagoda-studded capital, men, women and children line up early each morning for their share of government-ladled kerosene.
"I have been here all morning," complained one shopkeeper, gazing at the beat-up metal cans, plastic bottles and rusty barrels his neighbors brought to carry fuel home.
"They say the kerosene will be available this afternoon, so I'll have to keep waiting."
Much of Nepal's quaint village and city life resembles northern Europe in medieval times with peasants carrying huge stacks of twigs and food in funnel-shaped baskets strapped to their bent-over backs.
They live in hovels made of brick, trimmed by hand-carved wooden windows and doors.
The picturesque scenes are portraits of a destitute nation surrounded on three sides by India and bordered along the north by Chinese-occupied Tibet.
No one has counted Nepal's trees, but the government's news agency, RSS, said forests were suddenly being chopped down five times faster since India imposed the blockade.
Even before the blockade, Nepal suffered the fastest rate of deforestation in the world, according to the London-based Tropical Growers Association.
If more trees vanish, Nepal will eventually resemble its mountain neighbors -- Tibet, northern Pakistan and Afghanistan -- where much of the countryside is a moonscape desert of jagged, steep peaks devoid of animal or plant life.
The poor suffer the most from the blockade, in contrast to rich Nepalese who can circumvent the kerosene shortage by cooking on electric stoves or paying high prices for firewood.
The nation's impoverished majority, meanwhile, finds it difficult to discover twigs to strip off trees.
Cooking fuel has always been expensive in Nepal, forcing many to collect animal manure into huge piles which is traditionally stomped on by barefoot women into soft paste and molded by hand into hamburger-sized patties.
These are slapped onto the outside walls of most homes and left to dry.
The resulting hard circular disks of dung are then burnt, to cook food and heat rooms.
Environmentalists condemn this age-old practice because it prevents manure from being used as fertilizer, depriving farmland of minerals and producing wretched crops.
The new uncontrolled deforestation across Nepal's rugged mountains will also give the approaching monsoon rains less ground-cover to soak up its water.
Rain-fed floodwaters will come gushing down the Himalayas, destroying people and property not only in Nepal but also further south in India, environmentalists say.
Hundreds -- and often thousands -- of South Asians already die each year due to monsoon flooding.
But even after the border squabble is solved, it will take many years, if ever, before Nepal's rapidly disappearing trees grow back.
Nepal is one of the 10 poorest nations on earth and cannot afford extensive tree planting.
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