Swidden

In the 1970s and 1980s, the borderlands between southern Laos, northeastern Thailand and northern Cambodia were a hotbed of militarized conflict and insurgent activity. Various armed groups, on the political left and right, operated in what was later referred to as the Emerald Triangle. This article considers how ethnic Kuy (Souay) Indigenous peoples from the Lao side of the border in Mounlapoumok District, Champasak Province, southern Laos, fled to neighboring parts of Ubon Ratchathani Province, northeastern Thailand as political refugees after Pathet Lao communists took over Laos in 1975. Many later became stateless insurgents fighting for Lao anticommunist groups opposed to the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. In particular, the article considers the influence of political armed conflict on migration and citizenship status, and subsequently on agrobiodiversity
loss, particularly of native varieties of upland rice cultivated in swidden fields. This includes considering the structural violence associated with Thai government policies and practices related to forest conservation and preventing swidden cultivation. Agrobiodiversity loss was not centrally influenced by political violence, but it significantly influenced the conditions that affected agrobiodiversity, emphasizing the potential usefulness of studying political violence and agrobiodiversity loss through considering indirect influences.

Recent literature describing the process and pathways of the agrarian transition in Southeast Asia suggests that the rise of agricultural intensification and the growth of commodity markets will lead to the demise of swidden agriculture. This paper offers a longitudinal overview of the conditions that drive the agrarian transition amongst indigenous swidden cultivators and migrant paddy farmers in central Palawan Island, the Philippines. In line with regional agrarian change, we describe how a history of conservation policies has criminalized and pressured swidden farmers to adopt more intensive “modern” agricultural practices. We examine how indigenous swidden cultivators adjust their practice in response to recent changes in policies, security of harvests, and socio-cultural values vis-à-vis intensification. Rather than suggest that this transition will lead to the demise of swidden, results reveal that farmers instead negotiate a shifting ground in which they lean on and value swidden as a means of negotiating agrarian change.

A political ecological research orientation elucidates the effects of Miskito wage work
in the Honduran lobster export industry. Miskito wage labor conserves local rain forest by
displacing agricultural deforestation pressure into wages. These wages, however, are
earned in an industry that depletes Caribbean lobster populations and which increases risk
of injury and death to divers.

Une approche théorique basée sur une orientation de recherche politico-écologique
clarifie les effets du travail salarié des Miskito dans l'industrie d'exportation du homard au
Honduras. Du fait que les salaires diminuent le besoin d’argent, le travail salarié diminue
le déboisement aux buts agricoles et préserve la forêt vierge. Cependant les salaires
générés par cette industrie contribuent de façon significative à diminuer la population de
homards dans les Caraïbes et augment la risque d'accidents et de dangers de mort parmi
les plongeurs.

Una investigación desde la perspectiva de la ecología política es ulitizada para explicar
los efectos de trabajos jornales en la industria pesquera de exportación de langostas en
Honduras. Entre los Miskito el dinero que viene de trabajos jornales ayuda a reducir las
presiones de desforestación agrícola y a a conservar los bosques tropicales locales. De
cualquier modo, estos sueldos se ganan en una industria que disminuye las poblaciones de
langostas del caribe y que aumentan los riesgos a los buzos de graves lesiones or muerte.

Tribal areas in Orissa are some of the most backward and poverty ridden areas in the country. They are also extremely resource rich. 72% of the tribal households in Orissa live beneath poverty line. The paradox of “rich resources, poor people” in the tribal areas has been a ...

Across the uplands of Northeast India, sedentary forms of agriculture are gradually replacing shifting cultivation. In the process, land holdings are becoming “privatized.” As commonly held land becomes inaccessible or dis- appears, and mechanisms that formerly called for the redistribution of wealth transform, social inequality increases. The location of the Garo Hills at the border with Bangladesh renders the area a peripheral borderland, in which the Indian state exerts its presence. In his historical analysis of upland societies of the Zomia massif, James Scott (2009) emphasizes how the modern state strives to control and “make taxable” all of its subjects. For Tania Murray Li (2014), the development of neoliberal markets is the primary driver of change, as she shows based on long-term research in rural Central Sulawesi (Indone- sia). While the effects of both these transformative forces can be clearly felt, in the Garo Hills the ongoing dissolution of communally managed land and the creation of privately owned plots is nonetheless held in check by the persistent social obligation to maintain at least a certain degree of communal sharing.

The origin of swidden systems is typically portrayed as a pre-colonial, pre-nationalist, and pre-developmentalist tradition, subsequently interrupted and eroded by colonial exploitation and post-colonial technoscience in favour of market agriculture. A recent counter-position to this ‘anteriority model’ presents swidden systems as reactionary ‘refuge agriculture’ in search of remote locations to circumvent state accountability (Scott 2009). A third model traces swidden agricultural processes as a ‘dual economy’ of both subsistence and commodity production. This article examines these approaches through a study of maize and rice in eastern (Portuguese) Timor, where a particular type of environmentally damaging swidden system and colonialism have been shown to be co-emergent. Accommodating new archival data and adding detail to the established position on Timor’s agricultural history, it is proposed that the early twentieth century was an important phase in the extension and dominance of maize in Portuguese Timor; and while far-reaching modification to rice cultivation is generally associated with the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, it is shown that the early twentieth century was also a major developmental period for this grain. It is further suggested that dynamics of agricultural change have differed across the colonial divide between Portuguese and Dutch Timor. The article calls for more comparative research on the divided island of Timor.

Tribal areas in Orissa are some of the most backward and poverty ridden areas in the country. They are also extremely resource rich. 72% of the tribal households in Orissa live beneath poverty line. The paradox of “rich resources, poor people” in the tribal areas has been a ...

This study employs an historical institutionalist approach to analyzing causes of Siam’s approach to, and success in, establishing itself as a modern nation-state and thereby avoiding colonization, how the nascent Siamese state created and imposed a singular national identity on most of its subjects, why the hill tribes were left out of this process of identity transformation as Siam became Thailand.  It explores why the hill tribes did not become an issue of governmental concern until the 1950s and how the failure to impose the Thai national identity on the hill tribes during the nation-building process combined with their rise to political salience specifically in the 1950s led to particular perception of them within a culturally nationalist framework leading to decades of policies designed, both explicitly and implicitly, to promote assimilation in the latter half of the 20th century.

Tribal areas in Orissa are some of the most backward and poverty ridden areas in the country. They are also extremely resource rich. 72% of the tribal households in Orissa live beneath poverty line. The paradox of “rich resources, poor people” in the tribal areas has been a ...

Shifting cultivation systems (SCS) are currently restricted to tropical areas. The classical nutrient flow model for SCS considers increasing soil fertility from the conversion phase, with the addition of nutrients contained in the biomass that was slashed and burned, and made available through ash. This study assessed the impacts of the conversion and cultivation phases on soils subjected to an SCS practiced quilombola populations of the Atlantic Forest, Brazil. We used a diachronic method in six experimental plots divided into two fallow age classes (10-15 and 25-30 years). The results showed that fire does not have a primary role in the cycling and maintenance of the stock of nutrients in the soil/vegetation complex. Furthermore, the soil fertility status was not significantly altered during the conversion and cultivation phases. Thus, the quilombola SCS shows specificity and that soil fertilization does not necessarily occur during the conversion and cultivation phases of SCS. The soils from fallow areas between ten and 30 years have eutrophic fertility conditions in relation to the mature forests, and are therefore viable from an agronomic standpoint. Therefore, the data on the impact of the quilombola SCS on soils concur as proscribed by law. Resumo: Os sistemas de agricultura itinerante (SAI) estão restritos, atualmente, às áreas tropicais.
O modelo clássico de fluxo de nutrientes do SAI considera o aumento da fertilidade do solo durante a fase de conversão. Esse estudo avaliou os impactos das fases de conversão e de cultivo sobre os solos manejados por comunidades quilombolas que praticam a agricultura itinerante na Mata Atlântica, Brasil. Utilizamos o método diacrônico em seis áreas experimentais, divididas em duas classes de pousio (10-15 e 25-30 anos). Os resultados mostraram que o fogo não tem papel primário na ciclagem e na manutenção dos nutrientes do complexo solo/vegetação. Além disso, o status da fertilidade do solo não foi alterado significativamente durante as fases de conversão e de cultivo. Concluímos que o SAI quilombola mostra especificidades e que a fertilização do solo não ocorre necessariamente durante as fases de conversão e de cultivo. Os solos das áreas de pousio entre dez e 30 anos apresentam condições eutróficas com relação aos solos da floresta madura, sendo viáveis do ponto de vista agronômico. Portanto, os dados sobre os impactos do SAI quilombola sobre os solos estão de acordo com o previsto por lei.

This article is about the ways the Drung (Dulong), a minority inhabiting a remote mountainous valley of Northwest Yunnan province (China), view the ‘natural world’ as part of a cosmological order in which human society is integrated. The article explores the principles of differentiation that preside over the modes of relation between the diverse components of this world, by paying close attention to subsistence activities. Until recently, the Drung people practised swidden agriculture, and hunting and collecting remained important secondary sources of food. These activities imply specific relationships with natural forces, deities and spirits, which constitute a socio-cultural means of accessing natural resources and obtaining prosperity, or ‘good fortune’. Four mutually non-exclusive modalities of transaction with these entities are identified, which capture the variability of peoples’ attitudes toward natural resources and ideas of social reproduction. Recent socio-economic reforms that have brought traditional cultivation to an end, threatening Drung people’s livelihood and culture, seem to influence the dominance of a certain modality of economic transaction.

Landlessness and rural deprivation have historically been virtually absent in the uplands of Northeast India. Currently, due to the increasing presence of a monetarised market oriented economy, rural destitution is becoming an everyday reality. Previously, jhum or swidden cultivation would produce subsistence crops such as rice in abundance, but in many places that is no longer the case. Steep population growth, increasing popular demand for cash and large-scale statist interventions have resulted in a growing pressure on jhum land. Forced by the substantial investments that the commercialization of agricultural production demands, and a need for cash more generally, jhum farmers are increasingly in need of credit, creating indebtedness and even alienation of land.

This paper aims to explore agriculture in modern-day Uaxactún, Petén, Guatemala. The results are based on two types of dataspatial and anthropological. Spatial data are represented in the visualization of recent agricultural features (Milpas) visualized from orthophoto maps, processed in QGIS 3.10.1. Anthropological data were obtained during July and August 2019 in the Uaxactún, as a part of the Regional Archaeological Project of Uaxactún (Proyecto arqueológico regional Uaxactún-PARU). 18 respondents had taken part in the research. The research was conducted by semi-structured interviews and participant observation. To list findsthe average Milpa dimension was described, most interesting crops and agricultural techniques were described, and a model of the local agricultural year was provided. The key find is that, even if one could interpret recent Uaxactún agriculture as traditional, the drives and motivations of the farmers are modern, capitalistic, and monetary oriented.