The Himalayan region is often introduced through its dramatic landscapes, fragile ecosystems, and socio-cultural richness, but its deeper story is one of livelihoods, governance, and the search for a viable future. Farming communities from the Eastern to Western Himalayas face an intensifying convergence of climate volatility, rapid urbanization, outmigration, shrinking farm sizes, and a growing dependence on external inputs, all of which erode household incomes and undermine dietary diversity and nutrition security. Additionally, this puts the region’s rich agroecological knowledge, diverse cultural traditions, biodiversity, and an enduring ethic of stewardship under threat. The Himalayan Agroecology Initiative (HAI) emerged in this context to help governments and communities in these fragile ecosystems to translate these challenges into coherent long-term policy, governance, and financing pathways through an agroecological lens.

HAI is implemented through a collaborative partnership involving the World Future Council, IFOAM – Organics International, IFAD, BMZ, LIBIRD, Alliance Bioversity International and CIAT, UNDP, and the Tarayana Foundation. Across Bhutan, Nepal, and the Indian Himalayan Region, the Initiative’s central insight is straightforward: Agroecological transitions succeed when food systems, not just farming practices, are transformed.

 “Organic by Default”: The Missing Support Systems

The Hindu Kush Himalayas is largely seen as a region replete with opportunities to improve infrastructure, energy development, and high-altitude accessibility. Resultantly, inhabitants face mounting pressure to modernize and urbanize, promote tourism, resource extraction and infrastructure, and outmigrate to diversify income streams. The shift towards a new paradigm based on holistic, community-focused, and ecologically sound approaches is urgently needed.

A majority of the population still depends on subsistence farming, yet communities’ traditional knowledge and local food systems are increasingly eroded by the dominant development paradigms.

On a positive note, the very ‘inaccessibility’ of these mountain ranges has meant a rather slow uptake of commercialized farming practices. Many farmers in the region therefore continue their traditional, “organic by default” practices, relying on very low external inputs. While these practices provide a strong ecological foundation, they are rarely supported by the wider policy, market, and governance conditions needed for a full agroecological transition. When training does reach them, it typically promotes chemical, commercial farming models. As a result of the lack of a supportive policy environment, extension services and the wider system still do not present agroecology as a possible, attractive, or viable path for them. This represents a crucial opportunity to strengthen livelihoods, local diets and health outcomes in a sustainable way. HAI seizes this opportunity by working at the intersection of policy, governance, and practice, ensuring that agroecology is not just another isolated concept, but a strategic direction embedded in national and subnational institutions.

In many locations in the Himalayas, farmers are showing a strong interest in strengthening their local food systems, resisting dependency on external inputs and rebuilding soil health. Yet they mostly remain constrained by policy environments that send mixed signals. Framed as development, livelihood support, and food security, current policies and schemes continue to reward unsustainable, input-intensive and de-localized practices, rather than those that benefit people and ecosystems.

Even where communities innovate, they have to navigate a landscape of structural contradictions. HAI’s contribution lies in identifying and addressing these systemic barriers, building on the experience of frontrunners such as Brazil’s PNAPO and 100 percent organic Sikkim in India, where long-term political commitment and policy coherence have been central to advancing organic and agroecological systems.

 100% organic Sikkim © Bernward Geier

Building Coherent Policies Through Agroecology Roadmaps

A critical area of work is policy coherence. Agroecology depends on the alignment of agricultural, biodiversity, forest, climate, nutrition, health, and market policies. In all three countries, these domains mostly operate in silos. HAI partners helped governments and key actors assess their policies and schemes against the HLPE 13 principles of agroecology, identify contradictions and gaps, and strengthen cross-ministerial coordination. This work is embedded in the development of long-term Agroecology Roadmaps in Bhutan, Nepal, and the Indian Himalayan Region. 

These roadmaps clarify direction of travel, sequence actions over a decade or more, and create mechanisms for accountability across political cycles. They demand the establishment of dedicated agroecology units in Ministries of Agriculture and the institutionalisation of multistakeholder platforms with a strong mandate to guide, advise, and monitor the transition to more sustainable, thriving food systems. An Agroecology Policy Alignment Index is being envisioned to make progress and contradictions visible across sectors. Such changes build the political and administrative continuity that agroecology requires.

Financial structures are another key lever. Agroecology becomes possible at scale when financial incentives stop rewarding harmful practices and value chains, and begin to support sustainable ones. HAI’s work includes analysis of subsidy regimes, identification of opportunities to mobilise climate and biodiversity finance, and support for designing agroecology-friendly public procurement systems. Most importantly, phased steps to repurpose fertiliser subsidies towards agroecological practices, inputs, tools, services, and value chains will be decisive. When the financial architecture shifts, the burden of risk no longer falls solely on farmers.

Local Governments as Engines of Change

Because governance in the Himalayas is deeply localised, HAI consulted intensely with representatives from institutions that are close to farmers, for instance, civil society organisations such as NFGF and FECOFUN in Nepal, alongside comparable farmer and forest user organisations across the region. These bodies provide a platform for farmers and forest communities to voice their concerns, strengthen their capacities, while creating solidarity. The roadmaps emphasize the leading role of such organizations and local governments, who should acquire the capacities and abilities needed to support diversified farming and local market development through training, peer learning, and financing, and who should be better supported through participatory assessments and monitoring tools. 

For instance, to support local governments in tracking their progress, HAI is envisioning a Local Agroecology Performance Index, a simple composite index that would allow Palikas, Gewogs, and Panchayats to assess adoption of diversified practices, landscape-level ecological outcomes, market relations, dietary diversity and nutrition, gender and youth inclusion, as well as governance quality. The Index would make progress measurable, visible, and actionable, enabling local governments to identify gaps, adjust, and celebrate achievements. A key area of work of the initiative is also to strengthen advisory ecosystems, blending formal extension with farmer-to-farmer learning, community seed and biodiversity networks, women’s groups, and youth collectives. 

Making Agroecology Economically Viable and Inclusive

Economic viability remains a decisive factor for farmers. Diversified systems require labour, resources, and community stewardship. HAI partners, therefore, work with governments to advance local market linkages, support territorial markets, encourage youth- and women-led processing and value addition enterprises, and pilot public procurement programmes that source agroecological produce for nutrition and social protection schemes.

Gender and youth empowerment are central to this work, even more so as agriculture in the Himalayas has become heavily feminised due to male outmigration, and young people will only remain in mountain agriculture if opportunities are meaningful, dignified, and rewarding. Strengthening women’s and youth leadership, ensuring aligned budgeting, and promoting their entrepreneurship are crucial, as transitions will not succeed unless the labour realities of women farmers, the aspirations of young people, and the structural inequities embedded in rural life are addressed.

A Focus Group Discussion on the agroecological journey of women farmers in Karekhola, Birendranagar-13, Surkhet, during the development of Nepal’s Agroecology Roadmap © LI-BIRD

Recent progress reflects this systemic orientation. In Nepal, the Agroecology Roadmap is being finalised, and the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development is actively involved in co-developing it. In India, Alliance Bioversity International - CIAT and UNDP India are preparing four state consultations in Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Nagaland, and Meghalaya in January 2026 to validate state baselines and set state-specific milestones, targets, and implementation structures, aligned with the Indian Himalayan Region Agroecology Roadmap. In Bhutan, the Tarayana Foundation andthe  Technical Committee organized a weeklong reflection workshop in Haa to critically review and further strengthen the country’s roadmap. In the course of 2026, HAI partners plan to organize a high-level Agroecology Conference in India to share their respective learnings and secure strong commitments from the national governments of the three countries.

Strengthening the Theory of Change

Working at the food system level brings opportunities, but also forces the HAI team and partners to confront its complexity and hard questions. This led us to strengthen the Theory of Change of the roadmaps’ development. Beyond strong pillars, the feedback loops and interconnectedness between production, biodiversity, markets, nutrition, health, governance, and resilience have now been more clearly articulated. This enhanced the rationale for change, which emphasizes why current agrifood trends in the Himalayas are economically, ecologically, and socially unsustainable. This clarification responds directly to government concerns about feasibility, accountability, and continuity, and strengthens the roadmaps’ credibility as long-term policy instruments.

Indicators emerged as another area of learning. Beyond agroecology indicators, roadmaps integrate system-level indicators as well as those on learning. HAI partners are working on a milestone table prioritizing indicators for the foundation, transition, and transformation phase. The quest for headline indicators for each milestone led to deeper thinking about what truly signals agroecological transformation and how monitoring systems can remain practical and simple enough for government officials and stakeholders to use effectively.

Finally, increasingly, the political economy is in focus. As agroecology challenges entrenched interests, subsidy regimes, market structures, and the legacy of the Green Revolution, roadmaps seek to address power dynamics, vested interests, and the concrete constraints faced by farmers, to ensure they do not remain merely aspirational. This, in turn, strengthened the focus on financial transition, institutional capacity-building, and on pilot landscapes as well as frontrunner villages and provinces/states, which should inform provincial/state learning and national policy.

Scaling by Shifting the System, Not the Farmer

Food Systems Thinking © TEEB

Across all three countries, one message has become clear: Agroecology does not scale through individual farmer adoption alone. It scales when farmers and the wider food system shift toward ecological and social principles. The Himalayan region’s vulnerabilities make it an early indicator of climate and ecological stress, while its innovations offer concrete lessons for mountain regions worldwide. The combined efforts of governments, stakeholders, and HAI partners demonstrate that agroecology is not an abstract ideal, but a pragmatic strategy for resilience, biodiversity, nutrition security, and dignified livelihoods in one of the world’s most fragile regions. 

Resources:

Check out the Himalayan Agroecology Initiative Fact sheet, which provides a reflection of the shared progress made over the past year in strengthening resilient agrifood systems across the Himalayan region: HAI Fact Sheet “Nourishing the Future: Our Journey to Strengthening Agroecological Food Systems in Nepal, India and Bhutan”

More information is available at: https://www.worldfuturecouncil.org/scaling-up-agroecology-himalayas-project/ and https://www.ifoam.bio/himalayan-agroecology-initiative-towards-common-roadmaps