ABSTRACT
Swiddens were the starting point of agriculture and are, in modified form, still an important part of the ever-changing landscape. Landscape-level environmental issues and global climate change have added to the already complex discourse on when, where, how and why external rules and incentives can or should modify the local dynamic of swidden transitions. Most of the agronomic research on swidden-fallow systems has focused on the annual food-crop component, with secondary attention to those systems where the fallow effectively becomes grazing land, providing manure to the restricted areas of food-crop production. Forest and agriculture cannot be separated in swidden-fallow systems without serious loss of functionality for both. Swidden-fallow farming systems that straddle the ecological forest and agriculture concepts have a strenuous relationship with institutional perceptions of forest and supporters of these perceptions in policy debates. Swidden systems in Asia are already undergoing tremendous change, largely driven by population dynamics and forward-looking economic policies.
