Shifting Forests in Northeast India

Growing international concerns over global warming, biodiversity loss, and the ongoing reduction of the world’s usable arable land have added new urgency to the old problem of replacing shifting cultivation with more permanent land-use systems (Bandy et al. 1993). These fears are based on the premise that swiddening is one of the major causative agents in tropical deforestation, a primitive remnant of the past, and in need of reform. It presupposes that these are forestal lands periodically despoiled by marauding forest dwellers. Even the term shifting cultivation suggests, misleadingly, not only nomadism, but also that agriculture is periodically imposed upon permanent forest lands. ¹ The logic appears to be that since these lands are intermittently covered with trees, then they should properly fall within the domain of forestry and agriculture should be discouraged.