A fully organic Ladakh? Towards food sovereignty on the roof of the world

In March 2020 I wrote about how Ladakh, India’s northernmost region bordering Tibet, faces a stark choice between succumbing to the dominant logic of ‘development’ that would erase its ecological and cultural uniqueness, and forging its own path of well-being building on this uniqueness. The context was that in August 2019, Ladakh went from being a region within the state of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), to a union territory (UT), administered directly by the central government in New Delhi. This was part of a decision by Delhi to make a dramatic change in the status of Jammu and Kashmir as a whole, from being a state with relative independence guaranteed under special provisions in the Indian constitution, to being two union territories under central government control (J&K as one, Ladakh as the other). The consequences of this action for J&K have been serious, but here I focus on Ladakh.