Northern Pakistan: High Mountain Farming and Changing Socionatures

Description

After political reforms and the completion of the Karakoram Highway in the 1970s, farming systems in the mountains of northern Pakistan have been subject to major transformations.

Among other changes, there has been a significant shift from subsistence agriculture to the commercial production of cash crops, while farming practices have become less important to the diversified livelihoods of the local population. Based on original field research in Nagar, Gilgit-Baltistan, this book provides a comprehensive and nuanced analysis of the actors and factors responsible for these changes in manifold ways. By applying a novel conceptualization of agriculture as social-ecological assemblage, this work also investigates how these local dynamics relate to broader processes of political, social, and environmental change.

Since the early 1980s, very little research has been done in the high mountain community of Nagar, located between Gilgit city and the better-known Hunza district. With detailed chapters on the environmental and societal history of Nagar, enriched by numerous photographs, maps, and illustrations, this book provides the first comprehensive study about this remote mountain community available in the English language.

Author Biography

Michael Spies is a research associate at the Faculty of Forest and Environment at Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development in Eberswalde, Germany. He completed his PhD in Geography in 2018 at FreieUniversität Berlin, focusing on the topic of agricultural change in the high mountains of northern Pakistan. He conducted numerous research visits to the region from 2014 to 2016. His other fields of research include theories of human-environmental interactions, agroforestry systems, and adaptation to climate change.