Abstract
In the wake of important economic reforms and an ongoing agrarian transition, non-timber forest products, most notably black cardamom, have emerged as significant trade options for ethnic minority farmers in the mountainous Sino-Vietnamese borderlands. Yet, after a series of harsh winters had already crippled cardamom harvests in the 2000s, extreme weather in 2016 decimated the cardamom plantations of hundreds of farming households. Drawing from sustainable livelihoods, livelihood diversification, and vulnerability literatures, we investigate the multiple factors shaping how these harvest failures have affected ethnic minority cultivator livelihoods. Focusing on four case study villages, two in Yunnan, and two in northern Vietnam, we analyse the coping and adaptation strategies Hmong, Yao, Hani, and Yi minority farmers have adopted. We find that farmers’ decisions and strategies have been rooted in a complex ensemble of factors including their degree of market access, other livelihood opportunities available to them, cultural traditions and expectations, and state development strategies. Moreover, we find that in recent years the Chinese and Vietnamese states have stood-by as affected cultivators have struggled to reorganize their livelihoods, suggesting that the impacts of extreme weather events might even serve state projects to further agrarian transitions in these borderlands.
Highlights
The Southeast Asian Massif—a broad expanse of mountainous uplands extending southeast from the Himalayas and shared among 10 countries—is home to more than 110 million people from diverse ethnicities [1]. Eighty million of these individuals live in southwest China and northern. Vietnam where they have customarily resided in isolated rural communities while maintaining semi-subsistence livelihoods
We investigate these actors’ perceptions of recent extreme weather events, before focusing our analysis on how increasing failures of cardamom harvests are impacting their livelihoods, and what their responses have been to date
Sino-Vietnamese border with Vietnam-grown cardamom and entering China through a chosen border border with cardamom anddestination, entering China chosen crossingSino-Vietnamese depending on criteria suchVietnam-grown as volume, place of origin, and through whethera the traders are border crossing depending on criteria such as volume, place of origin, destination, and whether the local ethnic minorities cultivators, Han, or Kinh
Summary
The Southeast Asian Massif—a broad expanse of mountainous uplands extending southeast from the Himalayas and shared among 10 countries—is home to more than 110 million people from diverse ethnicities [1]. A series of extreme weather events occurred in these uplands from 2008 onwards, the most disastrous to date being in January 2016 which brought heavy snow, freezing rain, and hail These events have revealed important differences in the coping and adaptation capacities of cardamom cultivators, and exposed a lack of interest by the Chinese and Vietnamese states to become involved in supporting such borderland residents. Households with greater livelihood asset pools can mobilize these resources to enhance their coping and adaptive capacities [17,18] With this in mind, we combine conceptual ideas from the sustainable livelihood, diversification, and vulnerability literatures to examine the impacts of extreme weather events on ethnic minority cardamom cultivators in the Sino-Vietnamese borderlands
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