New Delhi, March 4 -- In a typical February, farms in western Uttar Pradesh's Nangla Mubarik village are full of tall rows of ready-to-harvest sugarcane stalks. After all, the village is in Muzaffarnagar, the "sugar bowl of India". The district also hosts the country's largest jaggery market, accounting for 20 per cent of India's total jaggery production. But when Down To Earth (DTE) visited the village this February, several farms had replaced sugarcane with poplar nurseries. "It is as if someone has cast an evil eye on our sugarcane," says 80-year-old Satyaveer Singh, a farmer from the village. His family owns around 5 hectares (ha), which has always been entirely under sugarcane. But this season, for the first time, they gave 2 ha on l...