Through Farmers’ Eyes: A Day with Nepali Cardamom Producers

Over the last 20 years, the Eastern part of Nepal has become a major area for the production of large cardamom, entailing profound changes for local farmers and their livelihoods. In her thesis on “Commercialisation and the ‘good life'”, PhD candidate Marie-Luise Matthys explores, inter alia, whether the farmers’ lives improved according to their own definitions of the “good life”. To complement classical qualitative methods, Marie-Luise Matthys applied participatory photography methods. Eight farming families took pictures of their daily routine, which provided a basis for discussing what a “good life” means and how life changed because of cardamom production.

For the Knowledge for Development online platform of the R4D programme, Marie-Luise Matthys has compiled some of these pictures into the photo gallery "Through Farmers’ Eyes: A Day with Nepali Cardamom Producers"