Efforts brew to revive ‘green deserts’ in southern India’s tea country

Scattered groves of native trees, flowers and the occasional prehistoric burial ground are squeezed between hundreds of thousands of tea shrubs in southern India’s Nilgiris region – a gateway to a time before colonisation and the commercial growing of tea that reshaped the country’s mountain landscapes.

These sacred groves once blanketed the Western Ghats mountains, but nearly 200 years ago, British colonialists installed rows upon rows of tea plantations. The few groves that stand today are either protected by Indigenous communities who preserve them for their faith and traditions, or are being grown and tended back into existence by ecologists who remove tea trees from disused farms and plant seeds native to this biodiverse region.

It takes decades, but their efforts are finally starting to see results as forests flourish despite ecological damage and wilder weather caused by climate change.

The teams bringing back the forests – home to more than 600 native plants and 150 animal species found only here – know that they still need to work around their neighbours. Nearly everyone in the region’s more than 700,000-strong population either farms black, green and white tea or works with the almost three million tourists who come to escape the searing heat of the Indian plains.

Environmentalists say industrial-scale tea farming has destroyed the soil’s nutrients and led to conflict with animals like elephants and gaur, or Indian bison, that have little forest left to live in.

Workers pluck tea leaves at a tea estate in the Nilgiris [Aijaz Rahi/AP Photo]

Estimates say nearly 135,000 acres (55,000 hectares) of tea have been planted across the mountains, damaging close to 70 percent of native grasslands and forests.

“There is no biological diversity,” said Gokul Halan, a Nilgiris-based water expert, of the tea farms. “It doesn’t support the local fauna nor is it a food source.”

The forests among the tea farms are recognised by the United Nations as one of the world’s eight “hottest hotspots for biodiversity”, but the areas degraded by excessive pesticide use and other commercial farming methods have been dubbed “green deserts” by environmentalists for their poor soil and inability to support other life.

The Nilgiris region has also had to clear land to facilitate the increasing number of tourists and people from the plains who are moving to the region.

Poorer land makes it more vulnerable to landslides and flooding, which are now more common because of human-caused climate change. The neighbouring mountainous region of Wayanad suffered devastating landslides that killed nearly 200 people earlier this year, and Halan warns the Nilgiris may suffer a similar fate.

Halan also said that the region is susceptible to long droughts and excess heat because of climate change, and that’s already affected some tea harvests.

In a small mountain fold just a few hundred meters below the region’s tallest peak, native trees planted 10 years ago have grown up to 4.5 metres (15 feet) high. A stream flows amid the young trees that replaced nearly 7 acres of tea plants.

The region is also home to several Indigenous communities, called Adivasi, many of them classified as highly vulnerable with only a few thousand of their people remaining.

Representatives of these Adivasi communities consider themselves the original custodians of the forests and have also restored forests in the region. They say such restoration initiatives are welcome.

E Shekhar, left, and N Krishnan, who work for a restoration practitioner, water the native tree saplings and grasses after planting them at a site surrounded by tea estates [Aijaz Rahi/AP Photo]

Tea growers and factory owners say that the region’s entire economy depends on tea and it is relatively less harmful to the local environment compared with rampant development to cater to tourism.

Planting trees and shrubs in tea plantations, known as agroforestry, can ease the battle for space between farms and restoration, according to some experts.

Other crops and timber “can make tea plantations a bit more biodiverse compared to what is there currently,” said water expert Halan.

Officials of Tamil Nadu state, of which the Nilgiris district is a part, earmarked $24m earlier this year to encourage farmers to shift away from chemical-laden fertilisers to help preserve soil health. The state’s forest department officials also announced plans last year to plant nearly 60,000 native trees in the region.

Restoration ecologist Godwin Vasanth Bosco said adding value to smaller tea farming operations by growing special, higher-quality tea on smaller parcels of land can open up more land for reforestation without hurting farmers’ pockets.

He said if those working to restore the land were paid for that service, then that could be another stream of revenue for residents, as well as sourcing new products to sell from the native plants, for instance, those that have medicinal value.