Agricultural Development in a Tibetan Township

With small land sizes, precarious food balances, and a changing institutional landscape, farmers in Central Tibet have had to be resilient and adaptive in their livelihood strategies. Rural Tibetans retain a base in semi-subsistence agriculture from which to pursue other major opportunities that have arisen in the 2000s, including off-farm work and caterpillar fungus collection. As reported in this paper, farmers have been given a further boost in recent years through buoyant food markets, and after decades of neglect, increased policy attention to agriculture. This has increased household, wealth and reduced vulnerability, but with very low surpluses has had a limited effect on cash income, the vast majority of which must still be sourced off-farm. Thus, semi-subsistence agriculture provides a 'pathway out of poverty' including into the non-farm sector, but the transition will not be linear and will be influenced by a complex combination of forces. The paper documents the way that these forces have played out at the household level in the case study township of Duopozhang in Shannan Prefecture between 2010 and 2015. Analysis is based on an agricultural-economicbiophysical household model populated by detailed household surveys, and contextualized and cross-verified with detailed primary and secondary data at township up to autonomous region levels. This may shed light on recent developments in agricultural areas of Central Tibet that are not easily accessible or widely reported.