Shifting Cultivation - Shifting Cultivation in The Contemporary World and Global Environmental Change

Shifting Cultivation in The Contemporary World and Global Environmental Change

The estimated rate of deforestation in Southeast Asia in 1990 was 34,000 km² per year (FAO 1990, quoted in Potter 1993). In Indonesia alone it was estimated 13,100 km² per year were being lost, 3,680 km² per year from Sumatra and 3,770 km² from Kalimantan, of which 1,440 km² were due to the fires of 1982 to 1983. Since those estimates were made huge fires have ravaged Indonesian forests during the 1997 to 1998 El Niño associated drought. Efforts are being made in Indonesia to encourage shifting cultivators to alter the mix of activities and examine alternative cropping patterns, so that the slash and burn portion of their shifting cultivation is a smaller fraction of the time interval of the farming cycle . For example by introducing jungle rubber farming instead of coffee, the farming cycle for growing rubber trees can extend up to 28 years versus about seven for coffee. The outcomes not only reflect less time spent in the slash and burn phase, but also allows a cover crop (rubber) that provides a forest habitatquality much higher than the coffee farm environment. Furthermore the coffee use often is abandoned entirely, yielding litte of residual habitat and inviting a much earlier slash and burn element to recur.

Shifting cultivation was assessed by the FAO to be one a causes of deforestation while logging was not. The apparent discrimination against shifting cultivators caused a confrontation between FAO and environmental groups, who saw the FAO supporting commercial logging interests against the rights of indigenous people (Potter 1993, 108). Other independent studies of the problem note that despite lack of government control over forests and the dominance of a political elite in the logging industry, the causes of deforestation are more complex. The loggers have provided paid employment to former subsistence farmers. One of the outcomes of cash incomes has been rapid population growth among indigenous groups of former shifting cultivators that has placed pressure on their traditional long fallow farming systems. Many farmers have taken advantage of the improved road access to urban areas by planting cash crops, such as rubber or pepper as noted above. Increased cash incomes often are spent on chain saws, which have enabled larger areas to be cleared for cultivation. Fallow periods have been reduced and cropping periods extended. Serious poverty elsewhere in the country has brought thousands of land hungry settlers into the cut over forests along the logging roads. The settlers practice what appears to be shifting cultivation but which is in fact a one-cycle slash and burn followed by continuous cropping, with no intention to long fallow. Clearing of trees and the permanent cultivation of fragile soils in a tropical environment with little attempt to replace lost nutrients may cause rapid degradation of the fragile soils.

The loss of forest in Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines during the 1990s was preceded by major ecosystem disruptions in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the 1970s and 1980s caused by warfare. Forests were sprayed with defoliants, thousands of rural forest dwelling people uproots from their homes and moved and roads driven into previously isolated areas. The loss of the tropical forests of Southeast Asia is the particular outcome of the general possible outcomes described by Ellen (see above) when small local ecological and social systems become part of larger system. When the previous relatively stable ecological relationships are destabilized, degradation can occur rapidly. Similar descriptions of the loss of forest and destruction of fragile ecosystems could be provided from the Amazon Basin, by large scale state sponsored colonization forest land (Becker 1995, 61) or from the Central Africa where what endemic armed conflict is destabilizing rural settlement and farming communities on a massive scale.