AlertNet: For most of his adult life, Bidur Basnet has planted paddy rice each monsoon season on his five hectares of mountain land. But in the last five years, as monsoon rains have grown increasingly unreliable, he has had to abandon the country's staple crop.
Now he grows easier-to-water vegetables on half his land, leaving the other half fallow.
"How can we prepare our paddy fields when we do not know which month in any year the monsoon rains will drench our fields?' grumbles Basnet, 43, who gave...