No Country for Women: The Dark Side of Palm Oil Production in Mizoram

For generations, indigenous women in Mizoram’s Kolasib district have been central to jhum cultivation—the rotational slash and burn agriculture practised by the tribal communities that constitute 90 percent of the state’s population. Women held equitable decision-making powers and claim over the communally managed plots and worked on the basis of customary access instead of formal land titles. However, this practice was disrupted by the Mizoram government’s New Land Use Policy, introduced in 2011. Framing jhum as a destructive practice, the government promoted a transition to settled oil palm cultivation and introduced formal individual land titling. When land was formalised and titled, it went to men. In Kolasib (declared India’s first oil palm cultivation district), women now spend their days in smoky rooms pounding and roasting oil palm fruitlets for artisanal extraction, earning about ₹100-150 for one bottle of oil. They suffer from respiratory illness from wood smoke, shoulder and elbow pain from hours of manual processing, and exclusion from the commercial oil palm supply chain. Women who were equal partners in jhum now labour in the least profitable segment of a cropping system that displaced the one they had managed themselves. Furthermore, the environmental impact of oil palm monoculture is negative. It has reduced bird populations and replaced the agrobiodiversity that jhum sustained. The article argues that any sustainable palm oil policy or land-use policy must also be a gender-just one.