ABSTRACT
This handbook of locally based agricultural practices brings together the best of science and farmer experimentation, vividly illustrating the enormous diversity of shifting cultivation systems as well as the power of human ingenuity. Environmentalists have tended to disparage shifting cultivation (sometimes called 'swidden cultivation' or 'slash-and-burn agriculture') as unsustainable due to its supposed role in deforestation and land degradation. However, a growing body of evidence indicates that such indigenous practices, as they have evolved over time, can be highly adaptive to land and ecology. In contrast, 'scientific' agricultural solutions imposed from outside can be far more damaging to the environment. Moreover, these external solutions often fail to recognize the extent to which an agricultural system supports a way of life along with a society's food needs. They do not recognize the degree to which the sustainability of a culture is intimately associated with the sustainability and continuity of its agricultural system. Unprecedented in ambition and scope, Voices from the Forest focuses on successful agricultural strategies of upland farmers. More than 100 scholars from 19 countries--including agricultural economists, ecologists, and anthropologists--collaborated in the analysis of different fallow management typologies, working in conjunction with hundreds of indigenous farmers of different cultures and a broad range of climates, crops, and soil conditions. By sharing this knowledge--and combining it with new scientific and technical advances--the authors hope to make indigenous practices and experience more widely accessible and better understood, not only by researchers and development practitioners, but by other communities of farmers around the world.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|36 pages
Introduction
chapter 3|21 pages
Conceptualizing Indigenous Approaches to Fallow Management
part II|105 pages
Retention or Promotion of Volunteer Species with Economic or Ecological Value
chapter 4|17 pages
Relict Emergents in Swidden Fallows of the Lawa in Northern Thailand
part III|84 pages
Shrub-based Accelerated Fallows
part IV|46 pages
Herbaceous Legume Fallows
chapter 23|9 pages
Viny Legumes as Accelerated Seasonal Fallows
part V|142 pages
Dispersed Tree-based Fallows
chapter 30|38 pages
Shifting Forests in Northeast India
part VI|61 pages
Perennial-Annual Crop Rotations
chapter 35|10 pages
Fallow Management in the Borderlands of Southwest China
part VII|165 pages
Agroforests
chapter 42|13 pages
Does Tree Diversity Affect Soil Fertility?
chapter 48|23 pages
From Shifting Cultivation to Sustainable Jungle Rubber
chapter 51|7 pages
Alnus-Cardamom Agroforestry
chapter 52|5 pages
The Sagui Gru System
part VIII|79 pages
Across Systems and Typologies
chapter 55|12 pages
Rebuilding Soil Properties during the Fallow
part IX|61 pages
Themes
chapter 63|10 pages
Productive Management of Swidden Fallows
chapter 64|14 pages
The Feasibility of Rattan Cultivation within Shifting Cultivation Systems
part X|22 pages
Conclusions