Swidden Change in Southeast Asia: Understanding Causes and Consequences

Abstract

More than 50 years ago the FAO Staff through its forestry journal Unasylva issued an “appeal...to governments, research centers, associations and private persons who are in a position to help”. The plea was for information that would help the world overcome “...the greatest obstacle not only to the immediate increase of agricultural production, but also to the conservation of the production potential for the future, in the form of soils and forests... [N]ot only a backward type of agricultural practice...[but] also a backward stage of culture in general” (FAO Staff 1957). That impediment was shifting cultivation, or as we prefer to call it in this special issue, swidden cultivation. For centuries, swidden cultivation has been one of the most important land use systems in the tropics, including Southeast Asia. Numerous studies, including those of Conklin (1957, 1963), showed that in many situations it is in fact a rational economic and environmental choice for farmers in the humid tropical uplands (Fox 2000; Ickowitz 2006; Mertz 2002). While FAO did not succeed in its proposed research-driven “attack” on swidden cultivation, change in areas formerly dominated by swidden cultivation is now occurring at a rapid pace and, in much of Southeast Asia (and elsewhere), the system is being replaced by or transformed into other land uses. Change from swidden cultivation to other land uses may indeed be desirable for some farmers, but in other cases such factors as prohibitive legislation, land reform, logging, large-scale land development, exclusionary conservation zoning, and resettlement are driving change towards new land use systems with consequences that are still poorly understood. Do they, in all cases, represent an improvement, or is there a continuing rationale for swidden cultivation in the twenty-first century? Hum Ecol (2009) 37:259–264 DOI 10.1007/s10745-009-9245-2