ABSTRACT
Chapter 3, which follows this one, elaborates on the background and purposes of this volume. It also shows as major and immediate issues the critical situation in the uplands of the Asia-Pacific region and the pressures on shifting cultivators and their land. This chapter therefore sets out to examine broader historical aspects and, in doing so, briefly alludes to what we know of fallow management in some other tropical regions, from which lessons can be learned for Asia-Pacific. I draw only lightly on the United Nations University international comparative project on People, Land Management, and Ecosystem Conservation (PLEC), of which I was scientific coordinator from 1993 to 2002. Some of the arguments of this chapter are illustrated in more detail in Brookfield (2001), a book that drew on the same symposium as that which spawned this volume, and in the two books that came out of the PLEC project (Brookfield et al. 2002; Brookfield et al. 2003).
