On the ridge above Khonoma village, the morning mist sits so thick you could mistake it for the edge of the world. Below, arranged in near-geometric tiers that drop sharply into the valley, are the terraced fields that have fed this community for longer than any written record holds. A woman moves through the rows, her fingers parting leaves with the unhurried certainty of someone who has done this 10,000 times before. She is looking for the axone fermented soybean wrapped in banana leaf that her mother buried in an earthen pot three weeks ago. When she finds it, she will carry it home, where it will be cooked with smoked pork and fiery raja mircha chilli, filling the kitchen with a smell that, to an outsider, borders on alarm and, to a Naga, signals something close to home.
Nagaland, the small, landlocked state tucked between Assam and Myanmar in India’s far northeast, does not often appear in conversations about biodiversity or food security. It should. Spread across roughly 16,500 square kilometres of subtropical and montane forest, the state sits inside one of the planet’s most celebrated biodiversity hotspots (the Indo-Burma region) and its approximately 1.8 million people, divided across 16 major tribes, have spent centuries constructing a food culture of extraordinary ecological intelligence. They are, in a very real sense, custodians of a living larder that modern conservation science is only beginning to measure. But measurement is overdue. And the news, when it comes, carries weight.
To understand Naga food, you have to understand the forest as infrastructure. Naga tribes like Zeliang, Angami, Ao, Lotha, Sumi, Konyak, Chakhesang and others have historically operated within a system of community-managed forests called tenyimi in some dialects, where land use, hunting rights, and gathering seasons are governed by customary law rather than any state authority. Within these territories, the forest is not wilderness in the romantic, untouched sense. It is tended, read, and eaten.
The range of what Naga communities harvest from their environment is, by any measure, staggering. Bamboo shoots fermented with mustard consumed in at least six distinct preparations across different tribes. Wild mushrooms, including varieties still unnamed by mycologists. River moss scraped from cold Himalayan streams, dried, and fried with ginger. Tree ferns, banana flowers, tubers, the larvae of certain beetles considered a delicacy and a protein source, hornets’ nests harvested seasonally, and, most famously, the smoked meats of domesticated and wild animals that form the backbone of the Naga table. “Every species in the forest has a use, a season, a story. Our grandmothers knew all three. We are losing all three at the same time.”
This variety is not mere gastronomic curiosity. It represents millennia of accumulated ecological knowledge encoded in practice, what anthropologists call biocultural heritage. Each tribe maintains its own taxonomy of edible plants, its own fermentation traditions, and its own seasonal calendar that mirrors the forest’s rhythms with precision. The smoked and fermented preservation techniques, evolved partly in response to the absence of refrigeration at altitude and partly from the sheer abundance of seasonal produce, have given the Naga kitchen a flavour profile that is unlike anything else on the Indian subcontinent: assertive, layered, umami-dense, and deeply tied to geography.
Central to this food system is a practice that has drawn more criticism than it perhaps deserves: jhum cultivation, or shifting agriculture. In the standard government and development narrative, jhum is an inefficient, forest-destroying anachronism that needs to be replaced with settled, permanent farming. This view has justified decades of policy pressure on Naga communities to abandon the practice.
The ecological reality is considerably more nuanced. Traditional jhum, practiced over long rotation cycles of 15 to 20 years, functions as a form of managed disturbance agriculture that actually generates and maintains biodiversity. A jhum field in its second or third year supports an extraordinary number of species both wild and cultivated in a mosaic of light and shade, woody regrowth and open ground that has no equivalent in monoculture farming. Studies conducted across northeastern India have documented that traditionally managed jhum landscapes can harbour more plant species per unit area than primary forest, precisely because they create edge habitats that a continuous canopy does not.
The problem began when jhum cycle lengths were compressed. Population pressure, shrinking community land holdings, and policy discouragement of the practice led many families to cut rotation cycles to five or seven years — too short for the soil to recover, too brief for secondary forest to properly regenerate. At that point, the ecological logic of the system collapses, and the criticism of degradation becomes valid. But the disease is the compression, not the practice itself.
The threats to Nagaland’s food biodiversity operate at multiple scales simultaneously, which makes them difficult to address with single-point interventions. At the forest level, decades of logging both legal and otherwise combined with the expansion of commercial ginger and areca nut cultivation, have reduced the extent and quality of community forests across several districts. Species that older villagers recall harvesting freely in their youth are now scarce enough to require half a day’s walk. At the household level, the shift is subtler but perhaps more consequential. Younger Nagas, particularly those who have studied in cities or been exposed to packaged food culture through expanding road connectivity and mobile commerce, are increasingly opting for the convenience of processed foods. The fermentation skills that underpin Naga cuisine, the precise timing, the reading of texture and smell, and the knowledge of which container to use and at what altitude are not written down anywhere. They exist in the hands and noses of older women, and they are not being transmitted with the urgency the situation demands. “The forest doesn’t look very different yet. But fewer and fewer people know what to do with what it offers.”
Layered over these pressures is the emerging disruption of climate change, whose effects in the Eastern Himalayas and Naga Hills are arriving in ways that interact badly with an already stressed system. Rainfall patterns across Nagaland have grown less predictable over the past two decades. The monsoon’s arrival is later, its intensity in some years greater, its distribution within the season more erratic. For jhum farmers who time their burning, clearing, and planting schedules to the rhythm of the rains, this unpredictability is not an abstraction. It is a bad harvest.
Bamboo is one of the keystone species in the Naga food system. Its shoots are eaten young, its culms used for construction and its flowering cycle (which happens once in decades) is a traditional harbinger of famine. It is now showing signs of phenological disruption. Forest mushrooms, whose fruiting is tightly coupled to soil moisture and temperature cues, are appearing earlier or later than expected, or not at all in plots where communities have harvested reliably for generations. The wild river moss that features in several tribal cuisines depends on cold, clear water with specific flow rates; as stream temperatures rise and sediment loads increase from erratic rainfall, its availability is declining.
Against this backdrop, a set of small but determined efforts is pushing back. In Kohima, a growing number of restaurants and food writers have begun reframing Naga cuisine not as provincial or tribal oddity but as a sophisticated culinary tradition worthy of national and international attention. The Hornbill Festival, held annually in December, has become an unlikely but effective platform for showcasing traditional foods from all 16 tribes, connecting urban food enthusiasts with the communities that produce them. Entrepreneurial women in several villages have begun commercialising axone, anishi fermented yam leaves and smoked meats for online sale, creating modest but meaningful economic incentives for maintaining traditional production.
More structurally significant is the movement among some tribal councils to formally document and reinstate longer jhum cycles on community land, working in partnership with environmental researchers to build the evidentiary case for traditional land management as a conservation strategy rather than a threat. This is not nostalgia dressed up as ecology. The science, where it has been done rigorously, broadly supports the intuition that landscapes managed under traditional Naga systems sustain greater biological diversity than their replacements.
What these efforts share is a refusal to separate the cultural from the ecological to treat the forest as a biodiversity asset separate from the people who have shaped and been shaped by it. This integration is, increasingly, what conservation biologists themselves are advocating under the banner of biocultural diversity. Nagaland, if it can hold its threads together long enough, may turn out to be less a conservation problem than a conservation model
Back on the ridge above Khonoma, the woman with the axone pot is heading home. The mist has begun to lift, revealing the valley in its full, implausible green: forest, field, and the dark vertical lines of bamboo groves running up the opposite slope. The smell coming from the pot she carries is extraordinary — deep, bacterial, ancestral — the smell of something alive and transformed. There is a version of this story that ends badly, and the data makes it easy to write. Forests shrinking, knowledge evaporating, young people leaving for cities, rains arriving wrong, species quietly disappearing from landscapes where they have existed for millennia. That story is true, and it deserves to be told.
But there is another version, running alongside it, in the same hills. Communities who know, with a precision no satellite can match, what their land can give and what it needs in return. A cuisine so rich in fermented complexity that it could sustain a hundred restaurants and a thousand PhD theses. Forests that are still, against considerable odds, standing. And people who, when asked what they want for their children, say not just jobs and connectivity but the ability to read the forest, to make the axone right, to know when to plant and when to wait.
That is not a small thing. In a warming, homogenising world, it may be among the most valuable things left.
Machilie Diswang & Santosh Pathak are with the College of Agricultural Engineering and Post Harvest Technology, CAU Imphal
Views expressed are the authors’ own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth