Is There a Continuing Rationale for Swidden Cultivation in the 21st Century?

Abstract

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 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 implications of swidden transformation for rural livelihoods (Cramb et al. 2009; Fox et al. 2009), and a final set of articles addressed the impacts on the environment of swidden cultivation as well as of the systems that are replacing swidden cultivation (Bruun et al. 2009; Rerkasem et al. 2009; Ziegler et al. 2009). That special issue settled a number of questions about swidden cultivation in Southeast Asia, but also raised a number of other concerns. Indeed, despite a relatively large number of case studies from that region, the knowledge of swidden cultivation is still very patchy and many essential elements such as exact areas under swidden management, the number of persons involved, and the livelihood and environmental consequences of swidden transformations remained only partially N. Van Vliet :O. Mertz (*) : T. Birch-Thomsen Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen, Oster Voldgade 10, 1350 Copenhagen K, Denmark e-mail: om@geo.ku.dk