In the years after World War II broke out in 1939, the British military in the subcontinent began to fall short of food.

Early 1943, the military demand for vegetables peaked for troops stationed in the Madras province and erstwhile Ceylon. In January that year, the director of agriculture for Madras, wrote to the government noting that troops in the province required about 1,4500 kg of “fresh English vegetables per day” and predicted that the demand would rise sharply.

As a consequence, about 250 acres of land in the Nilgiris would be needed to meet this demand, he estimated. However, in just two months, the area needed to feed the troops surged to 3,200 acres.

In March 1943, the government issued five-year land leases to farmers. These included leases on shola forests and grasslands. The government even issued interest free loans for clearing sholas.

As the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation marks International Day of Forests on March 21 with the theme “Forests and Foods”, that wartime episode is worth recalling. The liberal lease of sholas and grasslands on the upper Nilgiris Plateau resulted in farmers clearing sholas, digging up grasslands and sowing across the slopes.

This caused so much soil erosion, the local administration was ordered to enforce contour planting through the Defense of India Rules. Noncompliance by farmers would be a military offense. As is evident, forests provide food – but food imperils forests.

Paradoxical relationship

This paradoxical relationship between food and farming is among the discussions that will proceed on International Day of Forests. Wartime Nilgiris offers lessons on how forests become vulnerable during extraordinary times. Forests are biodiverse ecosystems, but during societal emergencies, forest land becomes the coveted arable resource.

Forests may be protected through national laws and international treaties like the biodiversity convention. But as nationalist and conservative governments come to power, forests are becoming as vulnerable as they were during World War II.

In Brazil, deforestation in the Amazon region for soybean plantations and ranching during President Jair Bolsonaro’s reign from 2019 to 2022 is evidence of that. So too is Donald Trump’s dismantling of the US National Park Service.

The websites of the United Nations and Food and Agriculture Organisation remind readers that forests provide food and enable agriculture.

More than five billion people “use forest and non-timber forest products for food, medicine and livelihoods”, they say. As watersheds, forests “supply freshwater to more than 85% of the world’s major cities”. Providing wood for cooking and hosting pollinators for crops are other major forest roles.

“In some countries and regions, forests and trees provide around 20% of the income for rural households,” they say. The incomes ensure healthy diets, particularly for indigenous communities.

Yet, food is also a driver of deforestation. In 2022, a Food and Agriculture report said that between 2000 and 2018, almost 90% of deforestation was related to agriculture.

That year, the journal Science published a much-cited paper estimating that agriculture drove 90% of tropical deforestation between 2011 to 2015. Where croplands and pastures expanded into forests, the pathway was direct. Where forests were logged, and the cleared area cultivated, the influence was indirect.

Grow More Food campaign

The expansion of farming in the Nilgiris was part of the Grow More Food wartime campaign launched in 1943 to overcome food scarcity.

Taylor Sherman, a political historian of 20th century South Asia, points out that critical events the previous year had exacerbated shortages. In 1942, Burma, from which India imported millions of tons of rice, fell to Japan. The same year, a cyclone and disease struck Bengal’s rice crop, triggering the great famine.

The liberal lease of sholas and grasslands on the upper Nilgiris Plateau could be seen as an instance of farmers being nudged to shape their own destinies.

But in retrospect, unsustainable land use policy that caused deforestation and grassland degradation was the consequence of urgency and short-term thinking. SY Krishnaswamy, a joint secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture, wrote in December 1947 that the Grow More Food programme was a “war measure during when several emergency schemes were pushed through with a view to achieving quick results”.

The Grow More Food campaign was celebrated in posters, radio talks and other publicity material, but it did not make India self-sufficient in food. It was, as Sherman notes, a failure.

The Nilgiris story provides, from a regional and retrospective perspective, another reason for the failure of the campaign. The scheme caused conservation and sustainability problems. Biodiversity loss and soil erosion are environmental legacies of this food policy. The increase in the production of food in the Nilgiris was accompanied by a decrease in biodiversity.

Nilgiris farmers were both food producers and soil depleters. As the former, they were feted. As the latter, they were subject to military penalties.

Here is a more telling irony. In its early phases, the Grow More Food encouraged deforestation. But in 1949, Sherman writes, the government initiated a week-long Vana Mahotsav (Forest Festival). Food Minister, KM Munshi endorsed the Vana Mahotsav, drawing “attention to the very heavy destruction of trees which he feared might result in erratic monsoons and seriously interfere with the Grow-More-Food campaign.”

As climate change poses drought and famine risks, and conservative populism rises, forests may well become patriotic frontiers for clearing and cultivation.

Siddhartha Krishnan is Lead, Ecosystems and Human well-being programme, ATREE. He is currently completing a book on the environmental sociology and history of agriculture and the environment in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve.