ABSTRACT
Shifting agriculture system involves a 'slash-and-burn' procedure on a piece of forested land, often followed mixed cropping and then a lengthy period of fallow, maintained by traditional societies living close to nature and natural resources in a forested landscape. There is no doubt that shifting agriculture is based upon the principles of fallow management. It is appropriate, in these circumstances, to discuss traditional fallow-management practices and the efforts emerging from these to find an 'alternative pathway' for shifting agriculture, based on fallow-management principles. Two articles on fallow management, one based on a lesser-known food crop, Flemingia vestita and another based on Alnus Nepalensis have emphasized the role of community-participatory strategies in stabilizing and sustainably managing shifting agriculture in the north-east Indian context. Arising from this theoretical framework, it was concluded that if one were to discuss concerns about agricultural-system sustainability, one would have to work somewhere in the middle levels of management intensity on this curve.
