Production networks and borderlands: Cross-border yarsagumba trade in the Kailash Landscape

Wallrapp, Corinna; Faust, Heiko; Keck, Markus

doi:10.1016/j.jrurstud.2019.01.016

Cited by 11 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Regulation and control of mobility across borders is of course a key means of asserting state sovereignty. At the same time, borderland residents agentively use borders as resources for their livelihoods (Chan and Womack 2016;Korf and Raeymaekers 2013;Wallrapp, Faust, and Keck 2019). Tracking the relationship between mobility and sovereignty, this article examines how political-economic transformations in both China and Nepal, along with both states' attempts to control informal mobility across the border, helped maintain social sovereignty by enabling Limi residents to perpetuate a ritual economy centred on a monastic institution.…”

Section: Non-state Sovereigntymentioning

confidence: 99%

“The land belonged to Nepal but the people belonged to Tibet”: Overlapping sovereignties and mobility in the Limi Valley Borderland

Yeh

2019

Geopolitics

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Recent scholarship on the lived experiences of borderlands has foregrounded and theorized the pervasiveness of anxiety, violence, and lawlessness. While useful, these do not capture all of the ways in which borderland residents relate to diverse constellations of power. This paper examines the China (Tibet Autonomous Region) -Nepal borderland through the case of the Limi Valley, in the northwest corner of Nepal's Humla district. Before 1959, the valley was considered part of Nepalese territory, yet its residents belonged administratively to the Tibetan government, an arrangement at odds with contemporary understandings of state territorial sovereignty. The non-postcolonial state formations of Nepal and China have created their own specific forms of border citizenship and overlapping sovereignties. The article shows how multiple sovereignties can stretch beyond state borders in unexpected ways by tracing how Limi Valley residents negotiate overlapping sovereignties of the Nepali and Chinese states, as well as the non-state sovereignty of the Tibetan government-in-exile. Furthermore, it demonstrates that these in turn overlap with a form of social sovereignty grounded in the community's body of laws, codes, and practices, which are at once a historically sedimented trace of Limi's governance before the nation-state, and a product of navigating political transformations. However, challenges to this social sovereignty, expressed through the idiom of statist law, have recently emerged. Whereas states typically exert sovereign power in borderlands by restricting mobility, some Limi villagers now selectively invoke state sovereignty through law to enable greater mobility.

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Section: Non-state Sovereigntymentioning

confidence: 99%

“The land belonged to Nepal but the people belonged to Tibet”: Overlapping sovereignties and mobility in the Limi Valley Borderland

Yeh

2019

Geopolitics

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“…However, Himalayan collectors are at multiple economic disadvantages compared with collectors on the Tibetan Plateau that have long-established trade relations with mainland Chinese consumers. For example, strict state regulations for caterpillar fungus trade in India resulted in the annual transportation of $5–7.5 million worth of local products across the Nepalese border to be ‘legalized’ for export [ 13 , 21 , 22 ]. Moreover, a $10 million per annum export–import difference exists between the Chinese and Nepalese custom borders, suggesting the majority of ‘Nepalese’ caterpillar fungus does not clear local customs [ 23 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Top-down policies continue to adapt and find the best practice of sustainable caterpillar fungus harvest in each region [21,22,[24][25][26][27]. However, local stakeholder and governing regimes would benefit from asserting their ownership of locally available natural resources, often found on community lands [28].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Profiling, monitoring and conserving caterpillar fungus in the Himalayan region using anchored hybrid enrichment markers

Wang

Negi

et al. 2022

Proc. R. Soc. B.

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The collection of caterpillar fungus accounts for 50–70% of the household income of thousands of Himalayan communities and has an estimated market value of $5–11 billion across Asia. However, Himalayan collectors are at multiple economic disadvantages compared with collectors on the Tibetan Plateau because their product is not legally recognized. Using a customized hybrid-enrichment probe set and market-grade caterpillar fungus (with samples up to 30 years old) from 94 production zones across Asia, we uncovered clear geography-based signatures of historical dispersal and significant isolation-by-distance among caterpillar fungus hosts. This high-throughput approach can readily distinguish samples from major production zones with definitive geographical resolution, especially for samples from the Himalayan region that form monophyletic clades in our analysis. Based on these results, we propose a two-step procedure to help local communities authenticate their produce and improve this multi-national trade-route without creating opportunities for illegal exports and other forms of economic exploitation. We argue that policymakers and conservation practitioners must encourage the fair trade of caterpillar fungus in addition to sustainable harvesting to support a trans-boundary conservation effort that is much needed for this natural commodity in the Himalayan region.

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“…Thirdly, the legalization process through the Nepali governmental mechanism is used for yarshagumba harvested both in India and Nepal. The publication Wallrapp et al (2019) 'Production networks and borderlands: the cross-border yarshagumba trade in the Kailash Landscape' 4 (presented in Chapter 6) analyses this part of the production network in-depth by linking the concept of global production networks by with findings from borderland studies Van Schendel and Abhraham 2005).…”

Section: Aim Of the Research Its Approach And Research Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Wallrapp, C., Faust, H. and Keck, M. (2019): Production networks and borderlands: cross-border yarsagumba trade in the Kailash Landscape. In: Journal of Rural Studies 66: 67-76.…”

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confidence: 99%

Governance systems of yarshagumba collection and trade in the border region of India, Nepal and China

Wallrapp¹

Self Cite

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Worldwide, the commercial collection of non-timber forest products (NTFP) has increased, with growing demands on domestic and international markets. This provides income opportunities for local people and links usually remote rural areas, where the resources are collected, with global markets. At the same time, it also enforces dependencies, increases the risks of overexploitation and extinction of the resource and often leads to contestation between different actors for access to these lucrative resources. Thus, actors modify and adapt existing governance systems to secure or gain access to the resource and profit from it. Commercialisation of NTFP leads to both positive and negative developments in remote rural areas.First, I would like to thank my two supervisors Prof. Dr. Heiko Faust and Dr. Markus Keck for their motivation, often pragmatic advice, cheering me up and for answering sometimes the same questions several timesmost of the time patiently, sometimes not so patiently. Especially, I would like to thank Heiko and Markus for understanding my situation, accepting my request to supervise my PhD, for believing in me and for responding always immediately to my requests, which contributed that I can complete this work within a limited time frame. Also, I would like to thank my GIZ supervisors Manfred Seebauer and Kai Windhorst who have supported me in overcoming some administrative hurdles, allowed me to integrate the PhD into my regular job and provided me the freedom I needed to collect my data. In addition, many thanks to my colleagues from ICIMOD, especially Dr. Tashi Dorji, who supported me and convinced me to write a PhD, Dr. Rajan Kotru and Dr. Janita Gurung for hardly getting tired of listening to my yarshagumba stories, Dr. Vishwas Chitale for his support in preparing study maps, and thanks to many of the other KSLCDI team members. Also, many thanks to the KSLCDI partners in India, Nepal and China for their various support to the field trips, workshops, posters, manuals, translations and meetings related to yarshagumba. Especially, I would like to acknowledge the support of the members of ANCA and CHEA. I absolutely enjoyed the joint field trips to the Kailash Landscape, although it was sometimes freezing cold. These were very special and great experiences for me, which I will never forget.My special thanks go to Ashish Chaudary and Shankar Badal, who accompanied me and walked with me most of the time during the fieldwork. Ashish was never tired of answering my questions and of starting conversations with local people about yarshagumba; neither during steep exhausting climbs, during early breakfast or at late evening hours. Also many thanks to Ganshyam Pande and Nabin Bisht for their time and efforts to get a better picture of the yarshagumba phenomenon in the Indian part of the Landscape. Further, without the help of the porters Chandra, Dharmanand, Narad and Tekendra, who accompanied us, the trips to the collection sites would have not been possible and not so pleasant.

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Production networks and borderlands: Cross-border yarsagumba trade in the Kailash Landscape

Cited by 11 publications

References 32 publications

“The land belonged to Nepal but the people belonged to Tibet”: Overlapping sovereignties and mobility in the Limi Valley Borderland

“The land belonged to Nepal but the people belonged to Tibet”: Overlapping sovereignties and mobility in the Limi Valley Borderland

Profiling, monitoring and conserving caterpillar fungus in the Himalayan region using anchored hybrid enrichment markers

Governance systems of yarshagumba collection and trade in the border region of India, Nepal and China

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