Is There a Continuing Rationale for Swidden Cultivation in the 21st Century?
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Is There a Continuing Rationale for Swidden Cultivation in the 21st Century? N. Van Vliet & O. Mertz & T. Birch-Thomsen & B. Schmook
Published online: 27 January 2013 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
Introduction Large areas of the tropical forest landscapes are still occupied – partly or fully – by swidden cultivation, but it is also clear that in many areas both the extent and intensity of swidden cultivation are changing. This is not new as it has always been a dynamic system used when it is opportune and changed or even dropped when other more favorable options for land and labor use, income, etc. appear. It seems that these changes now occur faster in some regions and slower or not at all in others (van Vliet et al. 2012). Political and economic pressures are the main drivers that have encouraged or enforced such changes, particularly towards more intensive agricultural practices or to other types of land use (urbanization, large scale plantations, protected areas, extractive concessions, etc.). However, the nature of these changes in swidden cultivation are not well documented, partly because swidden fields and the various successional stages of woody re-growth associated with it are often categorized as ‘unclassified’ or ‘degraded’ land or lumped together with other land cover categories (Padoch et al. 2007; Schmidt-Vogt et al. 2009). Swidden cultivation N. Van Vliet : O. Mertz (*) : T. Birch-Thomsen Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen, Øster Voldgade 10, 1350 Copenhagen K, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] N. Van Vliet e-mail: [email protected] T. Birch-Thomsen e-mail: [email protected] B. Schmook ECOSUR (El Colegio de la Frontera Sur), Av del Centenario Km 5.5, Chetumal, Q. Roo CP 77014, Mexico e-mail: [email protected]
is a smallholder category that government authorities find difficult to quantify because it forms part of a complex and diversified production system, together with other multiple small scale land use types (Gleave 1996; Padoch et al. 2007) and there is also little political interest in understanding the logic inherent to swidden cultivation and to quantify the number of people dependent on swidden as they are usually not a desired category of farmers to have appearing in official statistics (Mertz et al. 2009a). It is obvious that if such basic information is unavailable, planners and policymakers have no sound basis for decisions on land use and development in the poorest regions of their countries. In 2009, as a response to the lack of information on swidden cultivation, a special issue was published in Human Ecology providing a comprehensive and mainly literature based overview of swidden cultivation in Southeast Asia (Mertz et al. 2009b). Some of the articles highlighted the problem of defining and measuring the spatial and demographical extent of swidden (Mertz et al. 2009a; Messerli et al. 2009; Schmidt-Vogt et al. 2009), others addressed the drivers and impacts of swidden change by analyzing the political economy of swidden and the
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