Janet C. Sturgeon

Policies, Political-Economy, and Swidden in Southeast Asia

For centuries swidden was an important farming practice found across the girth of Southeast Asia. Today, however, these systems are changing and sometimes disappearing at a pace never before experienced. In order to explain the demise or transitioning of swidden we need to understand the rapid and massive changes that have and are occurring in the political and economic environment in which these farmers operate. Swidden farming has always been characterized by change, but since the onset of modern independent nation states, governments and markets in Southeast Asia have transformed the terms of swiddeners’ everyday lives to a degree that is significantly different from that ever experienced before. In this paper we identified six factors that have contributed to the demise or transformation of swidden systems, and support these arguments with examples from China (Xishuangbanna), Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. These trends include classifying swiddeners as ethnic minorities within nation-states, dividing the landscape into forest and permanent agriculture, expansion of forest departments and the rise of conservation, resettlement, privatization and commoditization of land and land-based production, and expansion of market infrastructure and the promotion of industrial agriculture. In addition we note a growing trend toward a transition from rural to urban livelihoods and expanding urban-labor markets.

Functional Links Between Biodiversity, Livelihoods, and Culture in a Hani Swidden Landscape in Southwest China

The landscape of Mengsong, southwest China, was biologically diverse until recently due to historical biogeographical processes overlain by the swidden-cultivation practices of the Hani who migrated there several centuries ago. Our research sought to understand how the Hani adjusted their livelihoods to new policies, markets, and technologies, and the consequences for biodiversity conservation. We combined landscape, plot, and household surveys, interviews, and reviews of secondary documents, to reconstruct the major changes and responses to challenges in the social-ecological system over previous decades. Significant changes from closed to open canopy of secondary-forest vegetation took place between 1965-1993 and from open-canopy to closed-canopy forest between 1993-2006, mostly explainable by changes in state land-use policies and the market economy. Most remaining swidden-fallow succession had been converted into tea or rubber plantations. Swidden-fallow fields used to contain significant levels of biological diversity. Until 2000, biodiversity served several important ecological and social functions in the Hani livelihood system. Indigenous institutions were often functional, for example, linked to fire control, soil management, and watershed protection. For centuries, the Hani had detailed knowledge of the landscape, helping them to adjust rapidly to ecological disturbances and changes in production demands. The Hani understood succession processes that enabled them to carry out long-term land-management strategies. Recent government policies and market dynamics have simplified livelihoods and landscapes, seriously reducing biodiversity, but greatly increasing the area of closed-canopy forest (including plantations) and undermining the usefulness of Hani knowledge and land-use institutions. Meeting both conservation and development objectives in this landscape will require new functional links between sustainable livelihoods, culture, and biodiversity, rather than seeking to recreate the past.

IDEOLOGICAL LANDSCAPES: RUBBER IN XISHUANGBANNA, YUNNAN, 1950 to 2007

Abstract In Xishuangbanna in the 1950s, an ideology of Han as the appropriate ethnicity for advanced industrial work underlay the establishment of state rubber farms as spatially separate from surrounding backward minority farmers. In the 1980s, this clear divide was complicated by state extension of rubber to minority farmers and some state farms recruiting minorities as workers. From the 1990s onward, state concerns with development and the environment have reworked social geographies, producing Han state farm administrators as environmental protectors and minority rubber farmers as environmental destroyers. The social-spatial divides have been reproduced, now underpinned by an ideology of environmental conservation.