Abstract

Stabilization of farmers' land uses with perennial crops is an urgent policy issue for sustainable forest resource management in the tropical region. However, farmers' behavior is affected by natural resource conditions and the socio-economic environment of their living sphere. This article aims to illuminate characteristics of a commercialized farming system practiced by forest-border communities and issues on intensification of their land uses with a case study from West Sumatra, Indonesia. Minangkabau farmers have long cultivated rice fields on flat land for subsistence, and recently dry land on mountain slopes for income. They plant the dry land with popular cash crops such as rubber, coffee, and cinnamon which have been introduced since the Dutch period. However, their dry land cultivation is hindered by many technical limitations, including soil degradation, poor seedling availability, and pests, although they could get over some of these problems with their own ideas. What is more burdensome is socio-economic constraints which small farmers can rarely overcome. Farmers have to invest much capital and labor in land preparation and planting, protection, and harvest of crops. However, they find it more difficult to work on their dry land in distant forests, compelled to concentrate more on cultivation of segmented and dispersed rice fields for their subsistence. Exacerbated by marketing fluctuations, small farmers with no production resources often give up growing cash crops, leaving their dry land uncultivated. Their idle dry land is too degraded to cultivate again without enough capital and labor. Farmers hesitate to fully introduce fruit trees and other perennials, afraid of cropping and marketing failure, and still rely on precarious frontier agriculture with the existing cash crops. Viable methods of land use intensification must be explored to adapt commercialized farming to local ecological and economic conditions through examination of various farming systems in other parts of Sumatra.

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