Is “slash and burn” – swidden agriculture – a good or a bad thing? That’s when farmers cut down an area of forest (though often leaving the larger trees standing), burn the cut vegetation, and plant their crops, often roots and tubers, in the resulting ashy soil for a few years. When the soil is exhausted, they move on to another patch of forest, leaving the first one to grow back, ideally for perhaps 20 years or more, before being used again. A recent article from a local newspaper in the Philippines makes this sound like something to be guarded against at all costs, but can a practice with a track record of sustainable management of agricultural biodiversity and other natural resources in various parts of the world stretching back thousands of years really be all that bad? Although there is always room for improvement, surely the problem does not rest with slash and burn itself so much as with what happens when the system goes wrong because of over-intensification and excessive shortening of fallows. That should have been explained in the article. I hope it was explained to the people who, according to the article, were forcibly prevented from carrying out their traditional agriculture. When forest conservation and farming livelihoods come into conflict in this heavy-handed way there can be no winners.
I’ve done quite a bit of work on this. Calling every kind of agriculture in the forest by one name is misleading. It all depends on how it done, as you point out. Among the crucial issues is how much management is put in to the regrowth phase. The Lacandon Maya system I have studied, now practically gone, was able to regenerate a tall diverse forest in 8 to 10 years, after five years of high-yield cultivation thanks to careful management of ecological succession. In the process, any lost fertility is restored.
The real problem is not reduction of the fallow cycle. Before that happens, farmer’s labor is syphoned off, for whatever reason (because kings want him to build pyramids or because he has to earn money to pay his taxes etc.). He can no longer dedicate the time to sustainabiity practices such as forest management, because he must work elsewhere. Then the system begins to degrade, but because of de-intensification rather than over-intensification.
There’s more, its a complex and fascinating subject.
But don’t you also think that over-intensification can be a problem too, under conditions where labour is not redirected as you describe?