The Forbidden Kingdom
Sustainable development keeps failing (but it doesn't have to!)
We took off from the Pokhara airfield on an overcast September morning. The turboprop Cessna we boarded, a 1980s relic of mountain aviation, sputtered and chugged as we climbed, jostling us on the torn leather seats between rusty armrests. The passengers on such a ride are a motley crew--a few foreign trekkers, some local Nepalis, a couple Indian pilgrims on their way to the temple at Muktinath, and some "embassy" folks on a spook mission to some Nepali air base on the Chinese border. As we gained altitude, the mid-rise homes--a sprawl of pastel oranges, blues, and greens--shrank smaller and smaller, swallowed by the lush jungle valley and Pokhara lake, until we punctured the cloud layer and were engulfed in white.
Minutes passed...
Suddenly, a blinding sunlight beamed through the windows and all we could see was blue sky and towering snowy granite. On the right, Annapurna I (the world's 10th tallest peak) sat majestically atop the high ridge. On the left, the imposing wall of Daulagiri I (the world's 7th tallest peak) loomed menacingly overhead. We cruised between the two, miles above the Kali Gandaki river which, over many millions of years, carved this groove in the Himalayas which now holds the distinction of being the world's deepest gorge, at a staggering 18,000+ feet. As we prepared to land, the pilot banked a wide turn, inching our starboard wing mere meters from the cliff face, before whiteknuckling into the semicircular landing pattern to hit the narrow valley airstrip at the small mountain town of Jomsom.
Welcome to the valley of Mustang, home of the Forbidden Kingdom.
The region of Upper Mustang radiates an arid magic. Caught in the rain shadow of the Himalayas, the region gets only ten inches of rain per year, creating a mountainous dustbowl terrain with sparse shrubs and dramatic undulating foothills that gradually flatten into the Tibetan plateau. The land's first residents, besides the vultures, blue sheep, and legendary but elusive snow leopards, were cave-dwelling mountain tribes and yak-herding nomads. In the 13-14th century, the region became a prominent salt trading route between China, Tibet and India--an offshoot of the silk road--thanks to the Kali Gandaki valley which carves the easiest traverse of the Himalayan range. This period saw the founding of the storied Kingdom of Lo, a humble Tibetan Buddhist dynasty whose culture has been preserved to this day throughout the valley, and within its mysterious walled capital city of Lo Manthang.
Despite formally being annexed by Nepal in 1795, the area had only every been accessible by foot--a 300 mile, multi-week caravan journey from Kathmandu--and so has lived in relative isolation for the past ~500 years. The area was closed to foreigners until 1992, giving it the well-deserved nickname of "forbidden kingdom". You couldn't even reach Lo Manthang by vehicle until they built a dirt road in the early 2010s, as part of an ongoing, contentious , and Chinese-sponsored infrastructure project to connect Tibet to India.
So why should we care about this place?
Because Lo used to be a self-sufficient kingdom in a rugged Himalayan terrain. A resilient, sustainable civilization in a punishing climate, that has found itself over the past decades in the crosshairs of globalization.
Globalization and its discontents
Lo wanted to develop sustainably, maintaining its self sufficiency and rich Buddhist heritage.
But reintegration with the modern world has created tremendous change, primarily in Agriculture and Tourism. Interestingly, the kingdom's approach to globalization differed between these two industries:
Agriculture took a laissez faire approach, letting farmers respond to incentives of the modern world
Tourism took a highly regulated approach, with restrictions on visitors and the type of development
Sadly, Mustang's aspirations for sustainable development have gone largely unmet in both areas. But understanding its story shines a light on how sustainable development fails--and why it doesn't have to.
Agriculture: The forces of environmental regress
The magic of the Mustang valley lies in its Trans-Himalayan climate. Despite arid land, proximity to so many elevated peaks blesses the region with runoff from glacial lakes. These reservoirs of aquamarine ice-melt trickle into the sand-colored landscape, picking up minerals from the sedimentary rock, until the alpine streams turn to sparkly silver rivers converging singularly into the Kali Gandaki river. The effect of this water means lush valley towns perfect for farming.
Students of regenerative agriculture should drool over an ecosystem like this: a perennial water source with gravity-fed irrigation, a broad variety of native crops, livestock such as yaks, goats, and cows to provide natural fertilizer, a cool climate that naturally manages pests, and an ancient community of people with deep connection to and knowledge about the land. Surely these folks would be a guiding light in Nepalese regenerative agriculture.
Or that's what I thought, at least, as I looked across the fields of Chhusang and Syanboche--terraces rich with Barley, Buckwheat, Beans, and Apples. But, after a brief moment, one can't help but wonder...
Where are the vegetables?
As it turns out, Mustang is no longer agriculturally self sufficient. And theres a few things creating this regress:
The first is climate. The effects of climate change have meant more unpredictable rainfall and temperatures across the country. In the past, the locals would grow a mix of grains, legumes, fruit, and vegetables--a full nutritional spectrum--locally. Now farmers, who make up around 65% of the population of Nepal, are being pushed to cash cropping as a means of managing risk. Why grow a sustainable diversity of crops (some of which may die due to weather unpredictability) when you can sell more resilient buckwheat, beans, or lentils to India/China for a predictable price, then just import the rest of your calories?
The next is competitive advantage brought by globalization. Places like India have such cheap labor that they can grow vegetables AND transport them to as remote a place as Mustang for less than the opportunity cost of growing those vegetables locally. Vegetables take a lot more work (like trellising, pruning, or protecting from birds and animals) so it's better to just stick to the cash crops where the effort pays off more.
Third is fertilizer. Chemical fertilizers have become essential to farming in Nepal over the years. Any farming community, no matter how isolated they once were, very quickly jumped on the bandwagon in order to juice yields for their cash crops. For decades, the Nepalese government has subsidized fertilizers as a means of bolstering an industry that now makes up >30% of GDP and employs the majority of its people. The government now subsidizes >60% of the cost of phosphorus fertilizers, which costs them ~$290M per year, and a growing budgetary problem. Now how does a place like Mustang, rich with grazing land, not find it cheaper to supply their own organic fertilizer from their plentiful livestock?
It comes back to opportunity cost. Yaks, used for their milk, meat, hair, and pelts, fetch ~$900 a head in Nepal. Goats around $100-300. The buyers of these products--primarily India and China--have massive appetites, especially for the higher quality Nepalese livestock. The shepherds of Upper Mustang won't sacrifice the size of their herds just to raise them in colocation with farms, especially when a single head can buy them hundreds of kgs of subsidized fertilizer.
In short, the valley has globalized quickly. Now able to access foreign markets and modern agricultural tools, the people of Lo are responding to economic incentives. And can you blame them?
Here lies the crux of sustainable development: You can't expect a community to globalize and develop sustainably UNLESS the incentives are in place to adopt renewable practices within that development. Nepal subsidizes fertilizer and not compost. You need to set up the sustainability policy infrastructure before you can expect farmers to respond. And poor governments will be challenged to prioritize it (in the face of numerous urgent economic challenges) without technical and financial support from developed countries.
Let's look at the other big part of their economy...
Tourism: Opportunity or Risk?
For a place as storied, culturally rich, and visually stunning as this, tourism is the other consequence of opening up.
Since letting in foreigners in 1992, Upper Mustang has maintained its status as a restricted area in Nepal. This designation means a few things:
Tourism is highly regulated, with fewer than 4,000 foreign tourists estimated in 2023. Visiting also requires a $500 permit, whose proceeds go to local development
Development of tourist infrastructure is limited to residents (no outside developers or operators), helping ensure that the benefits of tourism go to the community itself. A policy held across the broader Annapurna Conservation Region
Development has followed a typical trajectory. In the late 2000s, the first tea houses cropped up, sparsely distributed across the entire valley. When the road to Lo Manthang was built, a few more tour operators emerged to facilitate the non-trekker visitors. Today, Lo Manthang is a low-traffic but touristy town, with an old city of beautifully preserved monasteries surrounded by tightly packed red and white clay houses where residents of the ancient Lo families still live. Outside the city walls, local artists, trinket vendors, and tea houses make up most of the structures.
For a poor country, even the relatively small number of foreign tourists has brought steady revenue to the area. But it hasn't created a meaningful change in living standards. In Lo Manthang, the homes of the inner city are humble, and cattle roam the dirt paths, defecating as they please. In the smaller agricultural towns on the Upper Mustang trekking route, you'll see one or two sleepy guesthouses, but very little sign of development beyond that. Homes are still as rustic as you'd imagine them to be 50 years ago. The kids still go to school at the Monasteries in Lo Manthang. The locals you talk to--mostly women--will tell you that the men not involved in farming or tourism take seasonal work elsewhere (often in construction, often in gulf states), while the teenagers are mostly looking to leave to bigger cities like Pokhara or Kathmandu for school or work, without any strong desire to return.
The community has become touristy, and yet is not really developing.
Over the past two decades, road development in the Kali Gandaki valley has become a contentious issue. Connecting the valley to Pokhara (and civilization writ large), the Kali Gandaki corridor has successfully provided better access to food, hospitals, schools, and consumer goods. Although the road itself, snaking dangerously beside steep and rockslide-prone canyons, leaves much to be desired--especially in the rainy season--a 12 hour bus trip beats a week long trek, hands down.
The region has also faced a mounting threat of development from the nearby Tibetan border. A road to Lo Manthang would facilitate the export of consumer goods to the valley, unlock access to the natural resources of Upper Mustang (a massive deposit of construction aggregates, thanks to the region's sedimentary rock), and also be a step toward a broader infrastructure project to connect India and the Tibetan plateau.
Overall, this is not quite the tourism development story one would hope for.
Whereas agriculture globalized too quickly, without restraint, tourism took the opposite approach. Here's a region that has restricted tourism ("careful" development) in order to preserve its delicate culture, but after 30 years has yet to see most of the economic and community benefits of tourism (e.g. higher incomes, improvement in standards of living, retaining young people). Despite this, it has nonetheless already become a touristy shell of its former glory--just not a very lucrative one. And it continues to face growing threats of Chinese development. Locals are even pushing to scrap the permit fee to finally attract more visitors.
The region built a road, but not an economic and public service framework grow sustainably. Instead of bringing the wealth of low-impact tourism, the roads brought cheap packaged goods and an export route for the product of degenerative agriculture. Instead of better hospitals and schools, it brought an easier exit for Lo's people to leave the valley.
Economic vulnerability and poor institutions cost the valley a healthy transformation.
So what?
Upper Mustang is a living case study of the challenges of sustainable development; and there's a lot to learn.
First is that, in the unpredictable world of changing climate, risk management is the name of the game. In fact it always has been, for these remote areas. Only now, instead of managing the risk of isolation by diversifying agriculture and subsistence practices, they're maximizing their risk-adjusted incomes by embracing globalization through agriculture, and tourism. It's the only path to prosperity.
Second--and more importantly--is that the economic imperative of development trumps the sustainability imperative, and it's naive to think otherwise. Nepal's GDP per capita is around $1,400. The country ranks 165th out of 192 total countries on earth. If opportunities open up for poor Nepalese farmers to lift themselves out of poverty, they'll take those opportunities, even if it means environmental regress. This also means we shouldn't fetishize indigenous subsistence practices since those practices, too, need to adapt to a changing climate--it's patronizing to treat a culture's lifestyle as a "sustainability practice", when it's really just survival. And you can't force a culture to sacrifice development and quality of life in the name of some western-imposed image of ecological purity.
But more importantly, Mustang’s story reveals a playbook to sustainable development--anchored in effective governance that's needed at multiple levels.
At a local/regional, it teaches us to:
Plan infrastructure to reinforce public benefit, quality of life, and sustainable economic goals: health/education services, roads for exports, tourism services and environmental/cultural impact monitoring
Erect safeguards against extractive businesses (e.g. like the effective ACAP development restrictions mentioned above!)
At a national level, it teaches us to:
Provide the right incentives and subsidies to maintain regenerative practices in places like agriculture (e.g. natural vs chemical fertilizers)
Education programs on the importance of regenerative agriculture, waste management, etc.
Carbon taxes to tip the scale toward sustainable consumption. For Mustang, this would get them to import less high-footprint food and consumer packaged goods (whose litter and trash have become unfortunate hallmarks of rural development). These must be, of course, imposed fairly so the burden doesn't fall unfairly on low-income communities. Or else people take to the streets (e.g. the [Yellow Vest Movement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests))
At the international level this means:
Continued development of renewable technologies to drive down the cost curve and lower barriers to adoption
Foreign aid and international financing to help poor countries participate in the economic and resiliency benefits of renewable technology
In a nutshell, economic development and sustainable development are codependent, in a world of good governance. Sustainability can't advance in most of the world without basic quality of life needs met, as low income communities will strive to achieve higher standards of living, which today are coupled to higher emissions.
The only way out is to use sustainable innovation as the very tool to unlock development. Low-cost, resilient renewable energy. Electric vehicles with lower operating cost. Low-cost heat pumps and air conditioning. More nutritious, locally-grown foods...
Sustainability and its associated benefits (lower cost, higher resilience, better performance, more comfort) are the path to a better quality of life.
And here's the good news: these communities--with generations of experience being the most resource-efficient on earth--will respond quickly as soon as the right environment and incentives materialize.
And it's already starting.
Time to rewrite the development playbook. The world’s Forbidden Kingdoms have waited long enough.