April 6, 1998

A plague spotlights dangers of commercial monocultures.

By Bharat Desai

Like wraiths from a demented imagination, their naked, bony limbs poke towards a darkening sky. This is Jalil Mohammed's vision of horror. He dully strokes the trunk of a dying sheesham tree as its life -- and his livelihood -- ebbs away.

A plague is sweeping the sprawling sheesham plantations of northern Bihar, an area of 8,400 sq km stretching from the fertile Gangetic plains to the Terai grasslands bordering Nepal. First, the leaves of the trees turn brown, then they break off, the sap dries up, until all that's left is the landscape of dread. For the farmers of this dirt-poor, violent land ruled by criminal gangs, the sheesham plague only adds more misery to the wretchedness.

"Ped ko cancer ho gaya," they say resignedly in sheesham country. The trees have cancer. And well they might, because forget a cure, no one is even sure of the cause. More than 60 of Mohammed's 100 trees are dead. They are only good as firewood now, but he can't even chop them down. "No one tells me what's wrong and no one lets me cut them down either," says Mohammed, a farmer from Bettiah. That's because a government that doesn't know what's happening to the trees is loath to open a Pandora's box of controversy by allowing them to be cut down. "Preliminary examination suggests this could be caused by a fungus but we have to conduct further tests to confirm the suspicion," says B.D. Bhagat, the principal chief conservator of forests. He's talking of Fusarium solani, a fungus that normally affects the plants of the Solanaceae family -- tomatoes, brinjals and potatoes. If this is true, this is the first time that the fungus has chosen trees as its target.

Some suspect a microscopic attacker, a bacteria perhaps, but this is speculation. Clearly, further tests are needed, something primitive Bihar is incapable of. Scores of soil samples and infected pieces of stem and bark have been sent to laboratories in other states. This is causing delay in dealing with a problem that is growing by the day: it's been nearly a year since the disease was first noticed. A team of soil scientists and plant pathologists from the Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education, Dehradun, was rushed to Bihar in mid-March to study the problem, but it will take them time to find out what's happening.

One thing is clear though. The plague is the environmentalists' nightmare come true. Their thesis is that rows and rows of similar trees -- monocultures for commercial purposes -- are an invitation to ecological doomsday. Microscopic predators and insects that take a liking to one tree would feast on a forest of them.

That is exactly what has happened in Bihar. The maximum damage has been done in areas with exclusive artificial forests of sheesham. Mixed plantations have been largely saved from the ravages of the plague; only the odd tree has been affected. "The basic norms of forestry prohibit monoculture as the tree becomes vulnerable to outbreaks of epidemics," confirms Ashok Prasad, the conservator of forests, Bettiah. "The popularity of the tree has been its undoing."

The fast-growing sheesham is the mainstay of Bihar's furniture industry; it's also extensively used as fuel in the dirt-poor interiors of this backward land. A fully grown sheesham tree with the right girth and proper shape can fetch anything up to Rs 10,000. Not surprisingly, every field in the region is bordered by sheesham trees and degraded forest areas have also been planted exclusively with sheesham saplings.

The damage is most visible along canals and around ponds where the plantations were carried out to prevent soil erosion. "There could be a link between excess moisture and rising water table and the spread of the disease," speculates D.K. Shukla,divisional forest officer, Champaran.

The cluelessness of the Government dismays the farmers, who hoped to reap a rich harvest after the trees reached maturity. The Forest Department has banned the cutting down of trees till the report from Dehradun comes in. "If we start giving permission for felling, there will be a flood of applications," says one official. Meanwhile, the infection has spread fast in recent months. In true Bihar style, the ponderous bureaucracy simply ignored the plague. "We have been writing to our department and to Dehradun for almost a year now to take some action, but nobody seems to take the matter seriously," said an exasperated official.

There are also fears of damaged sheesham wood flooding the market. "The infected wood is not as strong," says Ram Phal Sharma, a carpenter in Nautan village. "Furniture made from this wood will certainly not last very long." That is the least of Jalil Mohammed's, and Bihar's, worries.

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