● Protected landscapes can generate hidden costs for farming communities by disrupting long-standing ecological linkages.
● The transition to chemical-intensive agriculture reflects not only changing aspirations but also the erosion of forest-agriculture interactions.
● Sustainable agriculture in conservation landscapes depends on restoring the social-ecological foundations that once made low-input farming viable.
In the villages surrounding the Kalakad Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve (KMTR), southern Western Ghats in Tamil Nadu, farmers historically maintained an intricate agroecological system that integrated agriculture, livestock pastoralism, and forest ecosystems into a functional landscape. Following the harvest, cattle grazed on ovai, the residual grain left in the fields. During the summer months, migratory flocks of native Chemmari aadu sheep breeds, including Selvalai and Pottu, arrived from the semi-arid tracts of Thoothukudi to feed on post-harvest sprouts and stubble. Their herders established temporary settlements known as kiedda (seasonal livestock camps), practising a form of transhumant pastoralism that enabled livestock to move across agricultural lands, forest margins, and foothills, synchronising with seasonal resource availability.
Crop protection similarly relied on ecological processes rather than external inputs. Farmers erected owl perches along field boundaries to encourage natural predation of rodents, and soil fertility was restored through green manuring with nitrogen-fixing species such as thakkai poondu (Sesbania bispinosa) and netti (Aeschynomene americana). In villages such as Singampatti, bat guano collected from caves and temple complexes in the foothills was brought to farmlands as an organic fertiliser, illustrating the movement of nutrients across the landscape. Farmers recognised the nutrient-rich value of bat guano and traditionally applied it to the local Singampatti chilli landraces, particularly the gundu and podi varieties.
These are signs of a well-evolved and tested socio-ecological system that depended on the seasonal mobility of livestock, the permeability of the farm-forest interface, and the continued flow of people and organic matter across the landscape.
When KMTR came under the World Bank-supported Eco-development Programme (EDP) in the 1990s, its stated objective was to reconcile biodiversity protection with the livelihoods of communities living around the reserve. The programme reflected the broader Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDP) approach, which emerged globally on the premise that development interventions could offset the costs imposed by access restrictions while integrating social development priorities with environmental objectives. At the time, this approach was widely regarded as a significant departure from earlier preservationist models that largely excluded local communities from protected landscapes. However, it has since been questioned whether such interventions generate more sustainable environmental outcomes or viable alternative livelihoods (Hughes and Flintan, 2001).
Around KMTR, livestock, particularly native nattu madu cattle, which were maintained largely for their dung used in agriculture, previously had free access to the reserve, but this access was progressively curtailed. The disruption was not merely economic but systemic. The resulting transformation was less of a voluntary agricultural transition, where natural nutrient cycles gave way to synthetic fertilisers, cultivation costs increased, and soil organic matter declined, leaving farmers increasingly dependent on purchased inputs to maintain productivity.
As wildlife populations recovered within the reserve, crop depredation along its boundary intensified. Today, wild boar, sambar deer, elephants, and peafowl increasingly damage crops, imposing recurring losses on smallholders already coping with rising input costs. Large farmers invested heavily in electric fencing and other protective mechanisms. Small farmers face chronic crop damage and limited access to compensation, shifting much of the financial burden onto rural households.
This highlights a fundamental asymmetry in India’s conservation model, in which the economic and ecological burdens of sustaining protected landscapes are disproportionately borne by farming communities at the forest edge.
India has nearly 2.3 million hectares under organic cultivation and accounts for around 30 per cent of the world’s organic producers. Successive government initiatives, from the Paramparagat Krishi Vikas Yojana launched in 2015 to the National Mission on Natural Farming introduced in 2024, have positioned organic and natural farming as the future of Indian agriculture. Yet for farmers living along conservation landscapes, the conditions that once made low-input agriculture a way of life have been fundamentally altered. The farm-forest interactions that sustained these systems for generations have been progressively disintegrated, leaving chemical fertilisers less a matter of choice than of necessity.
In recent years, a small number of farmers returning from urban centres have experimented with what we term ‘neo-natural farming’ around the reserve, drawing inspiration from traditional agricultural practices. While these initiatives reflect a growing interest in organic farming, they often reproduce selected techniques without restoring the broader socio-ecological processes that once sustained them and operate largely through informal networks catering to niche urban consumers. This suggests that reviving agroecological practices requires more than recovering traditional techniques; it demands the restoration of the landscape processes and institutional support systems that once made those practices viable.
Yet even where farmers are willing to embrace such approaches, economic incentives remain weak. Although India has emerged as a major producer of organic food, much of its certified produce is destined for export markets rather than domestic consumers (CRISIL & APEDA, 2024). Within India, many farmers sell organically grown produce at conventional prices because certification remains prohibitively expensive. Even certified producers often receive uncertain returns, and in the absence of a reliable price premium, the financial risks of organic cultivation remain concentrated at the farm level.
On one hand, government programmes promoting organic and natural farming encourage cultivators to reduce dependence on synthetic inputs and restore ecological processes. On the other hand, fertiliser subsidies continue to make chemical-intensive agriculture the economically safer option for most farmers. Agricultural and conservation policies operate in separate institutional silos and are evaluated through different performance indicators. Farmers living in conservation landscapes stand at the intersection of these policies, yet the contradictions they face are rarely addressed through coordinated governance.
Earlier Integrated Conservation and Development Programmes (ICDPs) sought to reconcile biodiversity conservation with rural livelihoods by compensating communities for restrictions on resource use through alternative development opportunities. Decades later, the language has shifted from eco-development to natural farming, but the underlying governance challenge remains unresolved. Farmers in conservation landscapes are still expected to adopt sustainable agriculture without the landscape conditions that once made low-input farming viable.
The way forward lies not merely in encouraging farmers at the forest edge to adopt natural farming, but in recognising the landscape functions that have been lost and designing policies that restore or compensate for them. Sustainable agriculture in conservation landscapes depends on rebuilding the ecological linkages between forests, livestock, and cultivation that historically sustained low-input farming systems.
The first step is context-specific research grounded in local knowledge. Which traditional agroecological practices remain viable under present conditions? Can seasonal livestock mobility be partially restored through the sustainable management of mandhai poramboke and other forms of landscape-scale nutrient cycling? The answers will vary across regions and should emerge through collaboration with farming communities rather than top-down policy prescriptions.
Policy interventions should reflect these realities. Farmers in conservation landscapes require support for wildlife-proof fencing and other measures that reduce crop losses. Although organic certification costs are subsidised by the Tamil Nadu Organic Certification Department (TNOCD), these benefits have yet to reach many farmers on the ground, particularly in conservation landscapes where agricultural choices are already constrained by conservation objectives. Conservation-based labelling and landscape branding can create additional value only if supported by transparent value chains and price premiums that reach producers rather than intermediaries.
More fundamentally, India’s conservation framework should recognise that forest-edge communities already contribute to biodiversity conservation while bearing a disproportionate share of its costs through restricted resource access and wildlife damage. Accounting for these contributions through compensation mechanisms or payments for ecosystem services would help align conservation objectives with long-term agricultural sustainability.
The challenge today is therefore less about persuading farmers to adopt natural farming than about restoring the conditions that made such systems viable. This requires investment in landscape restoration, compensation for conservation-related costs, and market mechanisms that reward biodiversity-friendly production. Without addressing these structural constraints, efforts to expand natural farming in conservation landscapes are likely to remain limited in both scale and impact.
Kamarudheen Parambat and Teresa Scholastica Thomas are research consultants at ATREE. M Soubadra Devy is a senior fellow in resilient urbanscapes at ATREE.
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth