By Malcolm Cairns
This instruction manual of in the neighborhood established agricultural practices brings jointly the easiest of technology and farmer experimentation, vividly illustrating the big variety of moving cultivation structures in addition to the facility of human ingenuity. Environmentalists have tended to disparage transferring cultivation (sometimes known as 'swidden cultivation' or 'slash-and-burn agriculture') as unsustainable because of its meant position in deforestation and land degradation. although, a becoming physique of proof exhibits that such indigenous practices, as they've got developed over the years, may be hugely adaptive to land and ecology. by contrast, 'scientific' agricultural strategies imposed from outdoor could be way more destructive to the surroundings. additionally, those exterior ideas frequently fail to acknowledge the level to which an agricultural method helps a life-style in addition to a society's nutrition wishes. they don't realize the measure to which the sustainability of a tradition is in detail linked to the sustainability and continuity of its agricultural procedure. exceptional in ambition and scope, Voices from the woodland specializes in winning agricultural recommendations of upland farmers. greater than a hundred students from 19 countries--including agricultural economists, ecologists, and anthropologists--collaborated within the research of alternative fallow administration typologies, operating at the side of enormous quantities of indigenous farmers of alternative cultures and a large diversity of climates, plants, and soil stipulations. through sharing this knowledge--and combining it with new clinical and technical advances--the authors wish to make indigenous practices and event extra commonly obtainable and higher understood, not just by way of researchers and improvement practitioners, yet by means of different groups of farmers world wide.
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Extra info for Voices from the Forest: Integrating Indigenous Knowledge into Sustainable Upland Farming
Example text
Conceptualizing Indigenous Approaches to Fallow Management Clearly there is a wide menu of components from which shifting cultivators may choose to intensify land use (Figure 3-1), but this volume focuses sharply on indigenous innovations to manage fallow land in more productive ways. As illustrated in Figure 3-2, farmer approaches to fallow management may generally be classified as innovations to achieve the following: • • • More effective fallows, where the biological efficiency of fallow functions is improved and the same or greater benefits can be achieved in a shorter time frame; More productive fallows, in which fallow lengths stay the same or actually lengthen as the farmer adds value to the fallow by introducing economic perennial species; and Combinations of the two, where both biophysical and economic benefits may be accrued.
Modern changes may be only an acceleration of long-established trends. If one conclusion is that what farmers do makes sense when studied in its full context, then we shall have made no new discovery. But we will have helped the farmers in their struggle against an enormous body of pressure and ignorance. By exhibiting a 14 Harold Brookfield willingness to learn from farmers, we are doing something very important. We are joining other initiatives in placing farmers’ own practices first, such as the comparative United Nations University project.
This will help to delineate the region in which farmers could benefit from adoption of these systems. Shifting cultivators in East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia, have been particularly prolific in developing other indigenous tree-based systems. This innovativeness may have been spurred by the greatly reduced rate of fallow regrowth in the region’s harsh, semiarid climate and the need to bolster fallow functions. These practices include the use of Acacia villosa in the Camplong area of West Timor (see color plate 37); Albizia chinensis in Sumba (Fisher 1996); Erythrina sp.