A. Terry Rambo

Using Traditional Swidden Agriculture to Enhance Rural Livelihoods in Vietnam's Uplands

Abstract Research in Vietnams uplands shows that poverty alleviation and environmental protection can be most readily achieved by communities building, protecting, and using their own assets more effectively. This approach starts by looking at what poor people already have, not what they lack. By contrast, government development policies often seek to modernize the rural sector through the introduction of new agricultural technology and improved marketing without taking existing local capacities into account. Such policies often fail to achieve their objectives. Traditional composite swidden agriculture (CSA), by contrast, may be more environmentally sustainable and better able to enhance household food security than many “modern” agricultural systems. Therefore, improvement of existing systems of composite swiddening in combination with adoption of new ventures, such as cattle raising, may achieve greater success than attempts to replace swidden agriculture with completely new “modern” farming systems.

Shifting Cultivation Without Deforestation: A Case Study in the Mountains of Northwestern Vietnam

To assess the role of shifting cultivation as a driving force of land cover change we examined the social, cultural, economic, and spatial dynamics of land use in a Vietnamese village. Instead of the denuded landscapes associated with shifting cultivation, the landscape of Tat hamlet is composed of a heterogeneous mosaic of fields, pastures, and forest patches in various stages of secondary succession. Failure to see secondary forests, let al.one the benefits of secondary forests, has led to government policies encouraging permanent agriculture — most of which have failed. Failure to account for the effects of landscape heterogeneity also means that significant effects of land cover change are not being recognized.

Agriculture in the Mountains of Northeastern Thailand: Current Situation and Prospects for Development

Abstract The mountains in northeastern Thailand cover an area of about 25,000 km2, which is about 15% of the regions land surface. Although agriculture is the most important economic activity in the mountains, there has been little previous research on it. This study presents a general description of mountain agriculture in northeastern Thailand, which is shown to be quite different from the better-known agriculture in Thailands northern mountains. The northeastern mountains are diverse in environment, culture, and land use. Mountain agriculture is also diverse at the crop level. Field crops remain the main source of income, but in recent years, rubber has become increasingly important in some areas. Specialty crops (eg grapes, strawberries, exotic flowers, and temperate vegetables) generate high income and serve as a magnet for tourism, but they are grown in only small areas in a few favored locations. Poor-quality soil, seasonality and variability of rainfall, scarcity of surface water, broken terrain and steep slopes, insufficient supply of land, land tenure insecurity, limited possibilities for mechanization, high cost of transportation, and competition with foreign imports are the main constraints on development. However, promotion of specialty crops and agritourism offer some potential for mountain agricultural development in northeastern Thailand.

Shifting Agriculture in Asia: Implications for Environmental Conservation and Sustainable Livelihood

This volume, which is likely to be of interest primarily to specialists on the northeastern hill region of India, is a conference proceedings masquerading as a book. It presents a diverse collection of 33 chapters; most are focused on some aspect or another of shifting cultivation, but some deal only with forests or homegardens. Three-quarters of the chapters are about India; three of the remaining chapters are on Yunnan, China; two cover Laos; and one each discusses Burma and northern Thailand, while a concluding chapter examines some key problems relating to shifting cultivation. Given the unbalanced geographical coverage of this collection, it would have been more fair to prospective readers if its title had clearly indicated that the volume was mostly devoted to shifting cultivation in the northeastern hill region of India, with a few chapters on other randomly selected places in montane mainland Southeast Asia. The volume would have been greatly improved if the editors had exercised a heavier hand, since there is considerable redundancy in the chapters dealing with northeastern India. Does the reader really need to be repeatedly informed that shifting cultivation is a ‘‘primitive system,’’ that shifting cultivation is synonymous with slash-and-burn or swidden agriculture, or that ‘‘jhum’’ is the local name for shifting cultivation in northeastern India? These chapters also present sometimes contradictory estimates about the area of the land that is impacted by shifting cultivation and the number of people who depend on it for their livelihood. It would have been a service to readers if the editors had summarized such statistical information in an introductory chapter. The individual chapters are mostly short and vary greatly in quality: a few are quite interesting; many are rather tedious case studies of shifting cultivation in specific local communities, mostly based on government statistics, household surveys, and Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA)/Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA); and several might better have been omitted. None of the chapters makes a particularly innovative contribution to our understanding of shifting cultivation as an agricultural system, although some do present useful new information about the cultivation practices of specific ethnic groups. For example, the description of the ‘‘bun’’ system employed by the Khasi ethnic group in India’s Meghalaya state (see Chapter 24 and Box 2 in Chapter 7) will be of interest to those seeking ways to intensify swiddening. This is an innovative modification of slash-and-burn cultivation, adopted in response to growing land scarcity and shortening fallow periods. After the slashed vegetation in a newly cleared field has dried, earth is piled on top of it before it is burned. This process makes more efficient use of the limited energy content of the small available supply of biomass to heat the soil, which is then used to grow vegetables in raised beds. Yields are good, but, unfortunately, because the beds run vertically up and down hillslopes, erosion is unsustainably high. The bun method seems to resemble the ‘‘burnt earth’’ method employed by Chinese market gardeners in Malaysia, in which heating the soil increases the availability of phosphorous to the crop plants. The authors do not mention whether this process generates charcoal, which can also enhance soil fertility, as in the case of the ‘‘terra preta’’ anthropogenic soils in the Amazon that are currently attracting considerable scientific attention. Indeed, the potential of modifying slash-and-burn techniques to maximize the yield of ‘‘biochar,’’ which can both improve crop yields and sequester carbon to help control global warming, is a topic deserving of further investigation. A few other chapters seem to this reviewer to be worthy of special note: Chapter 12, by Shimrah et al, presents an interesting comparison of how different types of agroecosystems (paddy, swidden, plantations, natural forest) within the same landscape ecosystem in Arunachal Pradesh state of India differ in terms of sustainability and risks; Chapter 22, by Yimyam et al, reports on some promising farmer innovations to intensify swidden productivity in northern Thailand; Chapter 30, by Tanaka et al, examines the differential impacts on shifting cultivation of land allocation in several communities in northern Laos; and Chapter 32, by Kerkhoff et al, reviews the often conflicting impacts of multiple government forest conservation policies in India’s northeastern hill region. In their concluding chapter, the editors and associates present some interesting thoughts about shifting cultivation in relation to environmental conservation and the livelihoods of local communities. They point out that, in many parts of northeastern India and montane mainland Southeast Asia, shifting cultivation is complementary to other land uses (eg paddy fields, homegardens, forests) within a single complex landscape system, rather than being a wholly separate agroecosystem that exists in opposition to these supposedly more advanced forms of land use, as is often thought by government officials. Such ‘‘composite swiddening,’’ as I have elsewhere labeled this complex type of agroecosystem (eg Rambo 1998), is actually quite widely distributed in the mountains of northern Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar. The editors also make the counterintuitive point that traditional fixed field agriculture MountainMedia Mountain Research and Development (MRD) An international, peer-reviewed open access journal published by the International Mountain Society (IMS) www.mrd-journal.org

The Influence of Culture on Agroecosystem Structure: A Comparison of the Spatial Patterns of Homegardens of Different Ethnic Groups in Thailand and Vietnam

Different ethnic groups have evolved distinctive cultural models which guide their interactions with the environment, including their agroecosystems. Although it is probable that variations in the structures of homegardens among separate ethnic groups reflect differences in the cultural models of the farmers, empirical support for this assumption is limited. In this paper the modal horizontal structural patterns of the homegardens of 8 ethnic groups in Northeast Thailand and Vietnam are described. Six of these groups (5 speaking Tai languages and 1 speaking Vietnamese) live in close proximity to each other in separate villages in Northeast Thailand, and 2 of the groups (one Tai-speaking and one Vietnamese-speaking) live in different parts of Vietnam. Detailed information on the horizontal structure of homegardens was collected from samples of households belonging to each group. Although each ethnic group has a somewhat distinctive modal structure, the groups cluster into 2 different types. The Tai speaking Cao Lan, Kalaeng, Lao, Nyaw, and Yoy make up Type I while both of the Vietnamese groups, along with the Tai speaking Phu Thai, belong to Type II. Type I gardens have predominantly organic shapes, indeterminate boundaries, polycentric planting patterns, and multi-species composition within planting areas. Type II homegardens have geometric shapes, sharp boundaries, lineal planting patterns, and mono-species composition of planting areas. That the homegardens of most of the Tai ethnic groups share a relatively similar horizontal structural pattern that is quite different from the pattern shared by both of the Vietnamese groups suggests that the spatial layout of homegardens is strongly influenced by their different cultural models.

Does Agrotourism Benefit Mountain Farmers? A Case Study in Phu Ruea District, Northeast Thailand

Agrotourism is widely advocated as a useful strategy to develop mountain agriculture and improve farmers’ income and quality of life. However, the relationship between agriculture and tourism is complex, and the extent to which tourism benefits farmers remains uncertain. This paper examines the relationship between agriculture and tourism and assesses to what extent agrotourism benefits farmers in Phu Ruea district, a popular tourist destination in the mountains of northeast Thailand. The Phu Ruea agrotourism system generated gross income for the district of almost US

A Burning Issue: Rethinking the Transition from Hunter-Gatherer to Industrial Sociometabolic Regimes

16 million in 2014. About 80% of this income came from sales from specialty-crop farms and of tourism services operated by the households of local farms. The agrotourism system also created many employment opportunities for local people. There were 1500 people directly involved in the system, 90% of whom were farmers or members of farm households. Thus, there is no doubt that many local farmers derive significant benefits from their involvement in the agrotourism system. Although the Phu Ruea agrotourism system can be seen as a successful strategy for developing mountain agriculture, agrotourism is not a magic strategy to solve all the problems of rural development in the mountains. Only some localities are attractive to tourists, and only some farmers have the knowledge, skills, and resources to take advantage of the opportunities offered by tourism.

Identification of agricultural systems in the mountains of Northeast Thailand

Hunter‐gatherers are commonly seen as having a fundamentally different sociometabolic regime from agrarian and industrial societies because they are thought to directly appropriate the products of natural ecosystems without modifying those systems in order to enhance their productivity. However, ethnographic and archeological evidence reveals that many hunter‐gatherers extensively employed fire to manage their ecosystems so as to increase production of desirable wild resources, thus engaging in “colonization of nature” that is not qualitatively different from that practiced by other types of society. They systematically burned wild vegetation in order to increase populations of edible wild plants consumed by humans and promote growth of forage for game animals. Deliberate ecosystem burning by Australian Aborigines represented an energy expenditure of 1,512 gigajoules per capita per year (GJ/capita/yr), a level of energy use that is more than three times higher than the United States (445 GJ/capita/yr). It is their profligate consumption of biomass energy that explains why the quality of life of many hunter‐gatherers was often better than that of traditional settled peasant farmers. Hence, the extent to which hunter‐gatherers have a distinct type of sociometabiolic regime is called into question. It can be argued that in the course of social evolution, there have been only two sociometabolic regimes. In one type, which includes hunter‐gatherers, swidden agriculturalists, and industrial societies, extrasomatic energy does most of the productive work, whereas in the other type, that of premodern settled agriculturalists, production is largely dependent on human muscle power.

Shifting Cultivation: A New Old Paradigm for Managing Tropical Forests

Agricultural systems in Thailand’s northeastern mountains are described in terms of their type of crops, marketing channels, and labor requirements. Five distinctive systems are identified: The Field crop system, Fruit tree system, Industrial tree plantation system, Specialty crop system and Agro-tourism system. The different systems are compared with each other in order to identify their respective strengths and weaknesses as development models. The Field crop system covers the largest area of agricultural land and is found in all mountainous villages but it generates very low net profits per hectare. The Specialty crop system and Agro-tourism system generate very high net profits per hectare but cover only a small land area and have a restricted spatial distribution. Expansion of these high value systems may be limited because they are capital and labor intensive and require highly skilled farmers to manage them successfully. If these constraints can be overcome, they may offer a useful model for mountain agricultural development.