Population Pressure and Responses in Terrace Cultivation in Nepal

This monograph explains the survival strategies of mountain farmers. Rapid growth of farm based population at the prevailing low level of technological development and resource utilization system has raised the problem of population pressure on scarce land resource in the hills and mountains. It attempts to analyze the functional linkage between man and environment, and establish the relationship between geo-socio-economic conditions and constraints of physical elements for the development and maintenance of agro-based economy of the people in details. The in-depth study on lake watersheds reveals that land fragmentation has gone up to uneconomic level, cultivated land has extended/expanded to marginal slopes and altitudes, poverty situation has transferred to a situation of shared poverty, flow of out-migration has accelerated and prevailing crop-livestock system has been manipulated for adjustment.