An Area of Dankness: Food Security of Food Producers When the Kosi Comes Down to the Plains

Evidences suggest the Himalayan Mountains have been warming for a long time. The temperature rise expected in coming times raises apprehensions that melting snow and greater rainfall in the unconsolidated and sharply uneven mountainous domains will make floods more frequent and devastating. The implications regularly spill over to the foothills and regions that receive rivers descending from the stressed mountains. The Kosi Basin (KB) in India, falling within the eastern state Bihar, is one such zone below the Himalayas that has for years struggled with devastating floods which leave behind their trails of damages, land and life losses and abysmal poverty that force people to migrate to recoup from the tragedy. The transborder river Kosi, with man-made embankments of limited effectiveness, carries immense loads of water and silt. This paper illustrates the dismal and complex socioeconomic consequences of the vulnerability with empirical and actual observations to project the problems that are likely to intensify with further warming demonstrating the kinds of readiness required. Data collected from a sample of farming households, designed to capture the wet environment proximate to the river and discussions with focus groups operating on field, help to understand how the people cope with the natural forces by the planning of production and food security in a calculated way. The study conducted in a district in the Kosi-Ganga Basin observes that producers regularly bear the damages of land loss and soil infertility due to flooding and adapt to the hardships by mass migration to distant places and growing commercial crop maize while securing food security with the help of subsidized public support even as they also sell their produce to local buyers. The data suggests that larger farm size is no indicator of economic well-being in this dank environment where much of farming is not remunerative. An econometric model with Heckman correction shows that despite the constraints, economic incentives are important for crop choice with maize being a major alternative to food crops rice and wheat, but location of a farm with respect to the river and the road along with other agronomic and demographic factors is also a determinant of crop choice.