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Feeding a Moving Climate

  • Writer: Sreyamsa Bairiganjan
    Sreyamsa Bairiganjan
  • Jul 21
  • 13 min read

Updated: Aug 30

Issue 03 · Food Systems · 9.9667° N, 76.3168° E


The shape of growth is a contour.


A minimalist locator map marking the Rice Research Station at Vyttila, Kochi, near 9.9667 degrees north and 76.3168 degrees east.

9.9667° N, 76.3168° E. The pin falls on Vyttila.


An orchard, an embankment and a fishing right can all outlive the climate that made them valuable.


A sluice gate in Kerala leads to a Sundarban estate, an apple orchard in Himachal and a fisheries dispute in the North Atlantic. Each is part of the same story about where production belongs, who decides and what happens when the answer moves.


At Vyttila, on the edge of Kochi, the most important piece of agricultural equipment is easy to overlook. It is a wooden gate set into the bund around a field.


During the monsoon, the gate helps keep saline water out while Pokkali rice grows. When the rain weakens and salt begins to return through the creeks, the grain is harvested and the gate is opened. Prawns and small fish enter with the brackish water and occupy the field until the next monsoon begins to wash the salt away.


The field has not been divided between two competing uses but arranged through time, with rice receiving the months in which fresh water gives it an advantage and prawns taking over when salinity turns the same ground into a different productive landscape. Neither use has to defeat the other in order to survive.


The gate is more than a piece of farm infrastructure because the line it draws is allowed to move. A permanent shrimp pond may earn more cash in a good year, yet its true cost depends on what becomes difficult afterward. If conversion brings lasting salinity, alters drainage or affects the water used by neighbouring farms, it has exchanged a sequence of possible harvests for one specialised use. The missing entry in the calculation is the value of being able to choose again.


Climate change is making that choice more important. The temperature, rainfall and salinity that once located a crop or species are shifting, but fields, orchards, ports and legal rights cannot all follow at the same speed. The productive line moves first, while capital, institutions and people discover the movement later.


Pokkali survives because its line was never treated as permanent. In the Sundarbans, the effort to hold a similar line in place remade both the landscape and the economy behind it.

The water behind the bund


The Sundarbans make the line between land and water difficult to ignore. Rivers divide and reunite, tides push inland, and an island secured for cultivation can become saline again when a bund fails. In 1903, Daniel Mackinnon Hamilton began assembling leasehold rights over roughly 9,000 acres around Gosaba and tried to make this uncertain ground support a settled economy.


Hamilton had made his career with the Calcutta firm Mackinnon Mackenzie. At Gosaba, he built embankments and drainage channels, then added the institutions he believed cultivators needed if the reclaimed land was to remain productive. Cooperative credit reduced dependence on moneylenders. Consumer and paddy sales societies improved purchasing and bargaining. A model farm, a central cooperative bank and eventually a rural reconstruction institute turned the estate into an extended experiment in organising rural production.


The embankment and the cooperative performed different parts of the same task. One held back water long enough for cultivation, while the other made it possible to invest in the interval of security that had been created. Seed and labour mattered, but so did credit, transport, drainage, storage and a reliable way to act together. Without those complements, suitable land could remain economically unusable.


Daniel Hamilton's bungalow at Gosaba in the Sundarbans.
Daniel Hamilton’s bungalow at Gosaba in the Sundarbans, photographed in 2013. Photograph by Lokenrc, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. No changes made.

Rabindranath Tagore recognised the question. His own programme of rural reconstruction was based at Sriniketan, near Santiniketan, where village independence was being tested through education, agriculture and cooperative work. Tagore visited Gosaba in December 1932. Mahadev Desai, Gandhi’s secretary, followed in 1935 and later described the experiment in Harijan. They were drawn less by a particular crop than by Hamilton’s attempt to give a vulnerable landscape an institutional life.


The experiment also exposed a complication that Pokkali manages on a smaller scale, because an embankment does more than defend land against water. It decides where water may go, whose land remains fresh and who bears the damage when the line fails or is moved. Hamilton’s works made cultivation possible, but they also altered flows of water and sediment across a delta that had never respected straight boundaries for long.


That complication became more valuable, and more dangerous, when the water behind the bund could produce shrimp for export.


Traditional bheri systems in West Bengal had long worked with seasonal changes in salinity. Fish and shrimp occupied brackish ponds and tidal enclosures, while rice continued where freshwater and soil conditions permitted. Like Pokkali, these systems were adapted to variation rather than designed to eliminate it.


The arrival of hatcheries, freezing plants and overseas buyers changed what a saline pond could earn. From the 1970s onward, aquaculture expanded across West Bengal, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and other coastal states. FAO data show Indian aquaculture shrimp production rising from about 30,000 tonnes in 1990 to 102,000 tonnes in 1999. A field connected to the global shrimp trade could produce far more cash than the rice it replaced.


What transformed the landscape was the move from a seasonal occupation of the land to a permanent one. Bunds were raised, pumps installed and saline water drawn into agricultural areas. The pond owner received the export income, while seepage, obstructed drainage, disease and declining freshwater quality could spread beyond the pond boundary. The economic line no longer matched the physical one.


The Supreme Court drew much the same distinction in 1996, in the case brought by S. Jagannathan of the Gram Swaraj Movement. It exempted traditional and improved traditional coastal systems while restricting intensive and moderately intensive shrimp aquaculture within the Coastal Regulation Zone. Read in economic terms, the distinction also separated investment that earned from saline water while leaving a route back to rice from investment that risked closing that route.


Shrimp farming was not condemned by this logic. Permanent investment can support storage, skills, credit and market access that temporary arrangements may never attract, but the question was whether the price of shrimp captured the full bargain being made. Research on India’s east coast has found much of the expansion in aquaculture replacing agricultural land. Whiteleg shrimp farmed at moderate intensity could be far more profitable per hectare than traditional systems, yet it carried much greater financial risk. Disease or a fall in price could destroy the expected return within a season, while the salinity and altered drainage remained.


Pokkali works by refusing to treat either freshwater or salinity as permanent. The Vyttila gate makes specialisation temporary, allowing the field to profit from changing water without surrendering to it, partly because rice is planted and harvested within months. At the end of a season, the land can be used again without abandoning years of investment.


The export market could move shrimp far beyond the coast because freezing plants supplied cold after harvest. In the Himalaya, cold entered the economy at the opposite end of production. Apple trees needed it before they could flower reliably, and no packing house could manufacture the missing winter. One kind of cold could travel with the crop. The other fixed the crop to a narrow band of altitude.


In early 1922, a consignment of Golden Delicious saplings arrived inside that band at Kotgarh. The man who had ordered them was in jail, so his wife Agnes received the young trees and had them planted.

The cold above the orchard


The shipment had been arranged by Samuel Evans Stokes, who had come to India eighteen years earlier for reasons unrelated to fruit. On 9 January 1904, at the age of twenty one, he sailed from Philadelphia to work at a leprosy home in Sabathu. He later settled in Kotgarh and married Agnes, a local Christian woman, at St Mary’s Church in 1912. He adopted local dress, became involved in India’s freedom movement and was arrested aboard the Punjab Mail at Wagah in December 1921. After studying Hindu texts, he took the name Satyanand in 1932.


Apples were already grown in the Himalaya, but Stokes helped turn selected American varieties into a commercial proposition. After visiting orchards in the United States, he planted mixed apple, pear and plum saplings during the winter of 1916 and continued experimenting. In 1921 he imported Delicious varieties under licence from Stark Brothers, including the Golden Delicious trees that Agnes tended during his imprisonment. Fruit from the orchard was sold commercially in 1926.


Satyanand Stokes teaching local children in the Simla hills.
Satyanand Stokes teaching local children in the Simla hills. Photograph uploaded by WP iampiyushnegi, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. No changes made.

The success of those trees attracted other growers, but the crop did not spread through horticulture alone. Roads connected the hills to markets, nurseries supplied planting material, and packing, transport, traders and eventually cold stores reduced the distance between an orchard and a buyer. The apple economy rested on a chain of investments, each becoming more valuable because the others existed.


The chain also made the region vulnerable in a way that Pokkali was not. An apple orchard commits land for decades. The grower spends heavily before the trees reach full production and expects suitable winter chill, reliable flowering, manageable pests and adequate water to persist. Loans, household plans and local infrastructure settle around the same expectation.


As winters have warmed, commercial apple cultivation has also shifted upward, although the movement of orchards is not a clean measure of temperature alone. Research in Himachal Pradesh found cultivation concentrated around 1,200 to 1,500 metres in the early 1980s. By the 2000s, the main belt had shifted to roughly 1,500 to 2,500 metres, while cultivation was reported in places above 3,500 metres by 2014. Lower orchards faced inadequate chill, irregular flowering and declining yields. Higher districts found themselves on the favourable side of a line that had not passed through them before.


The phrase apples are moving uphill conceals almost everything that matters. The trees remain rooted. A household below may own mature orchards, a packing shed and years of skill, but no suitable land at a higher altitude. A grower above may acquire the right climate but still lack roads, nurseries, finance, storage or dependable buyers. Climate can relocate the opportunity without relocating the means to use it.


The movement also changes the value of land. A parcel once considered too high for commercial apples can appreciate as the chill line approaches. A productive orchard lower down can lose value before its trees, debts or supporting investments have completed their expected life. The gain and the loss do not fall on the same household, which is why adaptation cannot be measured only by whether the district continues to produce apples.


Hamilton’s experience at Gosaba returns here in a different climate, because new apple zones need the complementary institutions and infrastructure that older zones accumulated over decades alongside the crop. Meanwhile, growers below need credible climate information, replacement crops, finance for replanting and support during the years before a new orchard or livelihood produces income. Telling each farmer to move or diversify leaves a collective transition resting on individual balance sheets.


The Vyttila field and the Himachal orchard therefore sit at opposite ends of an investment horizon. One returns to its starting point with the monsoon. The other may need decades of suitable winter to recover what has been put into the land. A small movement in climate becomes more expensive when the asset was built to stay.


The productive geography was shifting at sea as well, but there the asset could follow it. Atlantic mackerel began feeding farther north and west, while ports, processing plants and catch records remained where earlier distributions had placed them. The problem faced by the orchard was reversed, because instead of climate leaving an asset behind, the asset crossed into another jurisdiction.


For Iceland to turn that arrival into an economic claim, the location of the fish had to matter in law. The country had spent much of the twentieth century fighting to make it matter. On 5 September 1972, the Icelandic patrol vessel Ægir found an unmarked British trawler northeast of Hornbanki. The trawler’s radio played “Rule, Britannia!” As the vessels drew alongside, the patrol ship lowered a device that caught and severed the trawl wire. The crew of the Peter Scott answered with coal, rubbish and an axe.

What the boundary promised


The encounter belonged to the second of the Cod Wars. Iceland had begun extending its fishing limits from four nautical miles to twelve, then fifty and finally two hundred. British trawlers entered the disputed water under naval protection. Icelandic patrol vessels cut nets and ships collided. Britain accepted the zone extending two hundred miles in 1976.


The trawl-wire cutter used by Icelandic patrol vessels during the Cod Wars.
The device used to cut trawl wires used by Icelandic patrol vessels during the Cod Wars. Photograph by Szilas, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain. No changes made.

Behind the theatre at sea was a question familiar to any shared fishery. A vessel that leaves fish in open water cannot be certain it will benefit from that restraint. Another vessel may take the fish first. Control over a defined area changes the incentive because the country that conserves the stock has a better chance of receiving the later gain. Iceland’s boundary turned water into a claim on the future, much as an embankment in Gosaba had turned a shifting delta into land on which people were willing to invest.


Yet the arrangement worked only while the productive ecology remained sufficiently close to the boundary. An embankment becomes vulnerable when water finds another course. A fishing right becomes vulnerable when the stock does the same.


The boundary was tested during the mid-2000s, when Atlantic mackerel began appearing in much larger numbers in Icelandic waters. Warming seas formed part of the changing environment, though scientists also pointed to stock expansion, prey distribution and other ecological factors. The precise shares of causation remained uncertain. From an Icelandic fishing boat, the immediate fact was simpler. A valuable resource associated with other waters was now feeding close to home.


Páll Guðmundsson wrote to Iceland’s fisheries minister and marine research institute. When no useful response arrived, he financed a survey himself. In 2007, eighteen fishermen and two biologists sailed aboard the Huginn, captained by his brother Guðmundur. Iceland’s mackerel catch rose from about 4,200 tonnes in 2006 to 32,000 tonnes in 2007 and 110,000 tonnes the following year.


Those catches altered more than Iceland’s income. They unsettled the basis on which the stock had been divided among established fishing states. The European Union and Norway could point to historical catch, specialised fleets and processing capacity built under the old distribution. Iceland could point to the mackerel now swimming inside its zone.


Neither claim was frivolous. Historical shares give investors and fishing communities some confidence that the rules will not change as soon as their boats and factories are built. Present distribution recognises the waters that now support and contain the stock. The difficulty appears when a stable rule begins to preserve a geography the fish have abandoned.


Páll and Guðmundur carried the argument onto the same boat. Guðmundur favoured an agreement that could give Icelandic vessels access to Norwegian waters, where mackerel were often fatter and more valuable. Páll opposed accepting a smaller Icelandic catch. The disagreement was not simply between cooperation and individual advantage. One brother valued a predictable bargain and access to a better fish. The other feared giving away an opportunity that the old bargain had never recognised.


That fear can make a moving stock harder to conserve. If future shares are influenced by recent catch, each state has a reason to establish the largest possible record before negotiations settle. A country that restrains itself may preserve fish that migrate into another country’s waters and strengthen the other country’s claim. A durable agreement therefore has to move gradually from history towards the new geography, recognising established investment while responding to measured changes in stock distribution and to each country’s contribution to conservation. Without such a method, the line that once made stewardship possible becomes the cause of another race.


Governments can revise a legal line when they reach an agreement. A farmer cannot negotiate salinity out of a field. Plant breeders instead asked whether the crop could be made to survive on the other side of the line. In 1986, Glenn Gregorio joined the International Rice Research Institute as a research aide. His work would lead him to a trait that Pokkali had carried out of Kerala’s brackish fields.

The line inside the seed


In 1997, Gregorio and his colleagues compared rice lines bred by crossing IR29, which is sensitive to salt, with Pokkali. The strongest genetic signal governing the plant’s balance of sodium and potassium appeared on chromosome 1. Later work refined the region now widely known as Saltol, while breeders used FL478, a descendant able to tolerate salt with Pokkali in its ancestry, to carry the trait into more productive rice.


At India’s Central Soil Salinity Research Institute, a programme conducted from 2010 to 2018 introduced Saltol into the backgrounds of Pusa 44 and Sarjoo 52. The resulting lines with nearly identical genetics still required evaluation, but the direction of travel was striking. A capacity shaped in Kerala’s coastal fields had been identified, separated and moved into rice intended for other saline landscapes.


Breeding had moved part of the line from geography into biology. A field could not move, but the range of conditions in which its crop survived could be widened. For a farmer facing saltwater intrusion, that wider range could preserve a harvest and buy time for a larger transition.


It could not settle why the salt had arrived. If a changing climate pushed salinity inland, a tolerant variety offered protection against a shared threat. If a neighbouring shrimp operation introduced saline water while keeping the profit, the same seed risked making the rice farmer absorb a cost created elsewhere. The plant could endure more, but endurance did not decide who should pay.


Apple breeding and fish surveys meet the same limit. New rootstocks and varieties can widen the climatic range of apples, but they cannot give a grower farther down the slope land farther uphill or finance the years before a replanted orchard bears fruit. Better surveys can establish where mackerel are feeding, but the measurement cannot decide how Norway, the European Union and Iceland should share the catch. Technology and evidence can move the biological boundary. Institutions still have to move the economic one.


The same balance is present in the old Pokkali rotation. Its rice carries a degree of salt tolerance, but the seed does not govern the field alone. The gate controls when brackish water enters, the monsoon helps restore freshwater conditions, and the seasonal arrangement limits how long either crop may claim the land. Together, biology, infrastructure and a rule about time keep the rotation viable.


The relevant economic choice is rarely between adapting and refusing to adapt. It lies between forms of adaptation that preserve room for another decision and those that make one profitable response difficult to reverse. Shrimp ponds need to bear the costs they send through shared water. Orchard transitions need finance and infrastructure that an individual grower cannot assemble alone. Fishing agreements need a known way to adjust as the stock moves, so that restraint does not become a disadvantage.


When the monsoon returns to Vyttila, the gate closes and rice enters a field that had recently held prawns. Nothing in the mechanism predicts which crop will be more valuable twenty years from now, or how far salinity will eventually travel. Its achievement is more modest. It allows the field to change without letting a profitable season become a permanent verdict.

Sources and further reading



Cover image. A fisherman casts a net across a working Pokkali farm in the Kadamakkudy islands near Kochi. Photograph by Shantham11, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. No changes made.

 
 
 

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