The immigration of non-indigenous populations in the forested areas, land given over to development, to exploitation or even to nature conservation, etc, all these elements make one wonder how much land is actually left for indigenous populations, what activities they are allowed to carry out, and it requires that one elaborate some kind of policy defining the position of these populations within the Nation State.
In defining the necessary land areas, two factors must be taken into account, each requiring very different spatial units :
- shifting agriculture with a long fallow ;
- hunting, fishing and gathering and the great human mobility that these activities imply.
Agriculture requires that land be defined in terms of areas to be granted, whereas for hunting and gathering, land needs to be defined in terms of rights : to travel over an area and extract the products.
When indigenous populations are left to engage in their traditional activities without any major external constraints, they do not destroy their environment.
If they are given sufficient land areas, not only do they not destroy the environment but they become, ipso facto, its protectors.
Hunting, fishing and gathering activities (whether for food or non-food purposes) cover much wider forested areas than agriculture. They require vast expanses, great mobility and occasionally a temporary settlement far from the village. An ecological constraint lies in the heterogeneity of the forest and in the fact that its resources are scattered all over any single area : Individual trees of one particular species might be as far as several dozen kilometres apart and there may only be one of its kind on any single population's territory.
Example of forest expanses and of the size of hunting territories : in the Amazon Basin, hunting areas necessary to American Indian populations : 250 km2 of uninterrupted rainforest for a population of 150 people.
Recognizing the importance of hunting, fishing and gathering in the economy and diet of indigenous populations entails specific consequences for development planning :
- hunting and fishing grounds and gathering territories must be taken into account as a whole (and not just partially) ;
either by granting them these areas, or by giving them permission to circulate on and take the produce from these territories, though the area might be owned by others or exploited economically for a different purpose ;
- temporary mobility must be allowed and made possible.
But if on the other hand development causes hunting, fishing and gathering activities to come to a halt, the diet of indigenous populations will lack protein and vitamin intake. It is therefore vital to provide other resources that would adequately palliate to this deficiency. It is very important to bear in mind the consequences of the application of different legislations and develpment projects : if hunting is banned, can one be sure that indigenous populations will have the know-how and want to switch to breeding fowl to replace game ?
Technological and psychological obstacles are numerous, and not the least being the fact that in all the societies with which this report is concerned, livestock breeding, often rudimentary, has a social and religious function and is not meant to provide food.
The wild resources that indigenous populations extract from the forest often provide goods for local, regional and even international trade. It is important to place these activities within the country's economic context and recognize how much indigenous populations contribute to the national economy.
- Reassert, recognize and take into account the value of the participation of indigenous populations in local networks and manage this participation (especially commercial hunting).
- Think in terms of local networks and not in terms of resources for international exports, and stimulate these networks.
In this context, we must remember that many indigenous populations live in remote areas that they alone can use in a rational and non-destructive way, and they 'export' some resources to other areas within the country ; in that sense, one must admit that they are putting these lands to very good use, in the interest of the Nation, land which is inaccessible and on which no other activity could be carried out for very long anyway.
This is especially true of groups of hunter-gatherers such as the Pygmies in Central Africa, the Penan in Borneo or the Negritos in the Philippines and Malaysia who all come across as real forest specialists.
Most secondary non-timber products are already exploited traditionally by indigenous populations, and several of these products have already been involved in long distance trade in the course of history. The advantage here is that there is a pre-existing technical savoir faire, just as there are pre-existing local trade networks along which the products travel.
During the colonization period, many of these non-timber products were studied, exploited locally, and inventories were drawn up. The latter are precious documents, available for modern research and provide precedents which one must take into account in any kind of study on the subject.
But in the exploitation of non-timber products, there are potential risks that cannot be neglected :
- exhausting supplies by excessive exploitation ;
this has been the case with rattan in Asia ;
- vunerability if people rely on one product only and if prices fall ;
example of damar resins and eagle-wood in Asia, and of hevea in the Amazon Basin ;
- networks may be diverted by non-natives ;
they settle in the production areas and compete with local indigenous populations (mestizos in the Amazon Basin) ;
- those doing the collecting may be exploited by intermediaries ;
the latter control prices and the conditions under which transactions take place.
From an ecological point of view, it is a question of whether the exploitation of non-timber resources can not only be expanded but also renewed, i.e. to what extent is the amount that has been extracted inferior to the level of natural regeneration.
Extracting forest resources requires scientific knowledge of the dynamics of populations of wild species (and such knowledge is far from being available at present) ; it also requires legal mechanisms aimed at regulating trade, and these are not easily implemented.
Besides, some problems may actually arise from the products themselves, especially as far as medicinal plants are concerned.
When it is a question of obtaining dry plants from the forest, there is always a risk that those gathering these products might falsify them in some way or other.
This was the main reason why the trade of Rauwolfia vomitoria roots was abandoned in Equatorial Afirca for example.
The reverse is also a risk (possibly linked to the previous one) : pharmaceutical companies may take an interest in wild medicinal plants growing in equatorial areas and extract from them the necessary constituents which they can then synthesize. From then on, supplies of the actual wild products are no longer necessary.
This raises a delicate problem, that of the indigenous populations' 'intellectual property' ; through the centuries, they have acquired a vast knowledge of plants and their medicinal values, and they will never be payed adequately for passing on such knowledge.
As far as indigenous populations are concerned, creating a protected area for nature conservation (such as national parks or nature reserves) can be a far worse catastrophe than starting up logging industries in their area, and its effects are equivalent to building a dam. The territory that the community had been freely travelling over for generations, and which was the basis for their livelihood, ceases to exist for them : they loose the land and are even sometimes resettled elsewhere. Of course, it is necessary to protect the ecosystems and save endangered animal species, but one must not mistake the enemy or sacrifice human beings to the dogma of Nature.
Traditional activities are compatible with the preservation of the forest canopy and a diversified fauna : one must remember that present equatorial ecosystems are the result of human activities. There are no such thing as virgin forests.
The disruptions forests are undergoing at present are due to commercial activities : exploitation of timber, forest clearing to provide arable land for new colonizing farmers, hunting and gathering for commercial purposes. Disruptions are never caused by local communities and their subsistence economy.
On the contrary : in the Amazon Basin, the only forests that still exist with
their full biological diversity are mainly those that coincide with the
boundaries of the reserves in which the Indians live.
- Equatorial forests such as we see them today are the result of 500 years of interaction with swidden cultivators.
- The equatorial forest is vital for 12 million people.
- In order to protect trees, is it really necessary to deport 12 million people to savannas or to towns ?
The main question that keeps coming up is : should one allow human beings to live in protected areas, and what rights should be given them ?
There is one major constraint that must be taken into account : planning areas of total protection where all human activity is forbidden entails a reduction of traditional territories and increased population pressure on surrounding areas, thus creating the conditions for potential forest degeneration.
This point will be taken up in the next section.
The prevailing policy seems to be to create 'buffer zones', but this expression has proved to be inadequate to describe any kind of real situation.
The notion of buffer zone was never really defined and it more or less includes all initiatives involving populations near a protected area. There is therefore no consensus whatsoever as to the goals of such schemes, their localization (within or outside the park ?), the criteria for setting up their boundaries, etc. There are very few examples of actual buffer zones demonstrating their efficiency (see WELLS & al., 1992). There are many practical problems (for example, how does one determine how much one should allow to be extracted in relation to the dynamics of natural species populations ?). However, it is especially important to be careful over the amount of land allocated to indigenous populations so as to be certain it will not be too little compared to the area covered by their traditional activities.
Instead of making buffer zones, maybe one should advocate a system whereby indigenous populations would actively participate in the maintenance of protected areas.
One should also look at the regulations that allow travelling, hunting and gathering for subsistence, but forbid hunting for commercial purposes, whether carried out by natives or non-natives.
But commercial hunting also provides important cash incomes to indigenous communities ; should it be outlawed, an alternative source of income would be necessary.
Important factors
- Long fallows (15-30 years) :
The vital element in the management of equatorial forests, ecologically or economically speaking, is the use of fallow periods (whether permanent or temporary) within the agricultural cycle ; only thus can the forest regenerate after agricultural exploitation.
- Cultivated areas :
Swidden agriculture works on a system whereby new land is cleared every year or every other year, in primary or old secondary forest areas (fallow lasts an average of 15 years, which is the amount of time recommended anyway for proper forest regeneration). The size of cultivated areas varies from one continent to the other, but depends more directly on a) the type of soil available and b) the sorts of plants grown on them (for example, tubers and bananas require less land than mountain rice).
| Region
(ethnic group)
|
cultivated
plants
|
plots/
year
|
area/
family
|
area/
person
|
| Cameroon
(Mvae)
|
tubers,
banana, marrows
|
2
|
1,3
ha
|
1
800 m2
|
| Cent.
Afr. Republic (Ngbaka)
|
tubers,
banana
|
1
|
0,5
ha
|
800
m2
|
| Amazon
Basin
|
manioc,
maize, banana
|
1
|
0,5
ha
|
800
m2
|
| New
Guinea
|
tubers,
banana
|
0,2-0,6
ha
|
600
m2
| |
| Borneo
|
dry
rice
|
1-3
|
2
- 5 ha
|
300
- 600 m2
|
| Philippines
(Hanunòo)
|
tubers,
rice
|
1
|
1
ha
|
1
700 m2
|
| Philippines
(Tagbanwa)
|
dry
rice, tubers
|
2
|
0,5-0,8
ha
|
800
- 1300 m2
|
Generally speaking, cultivators do not organize their work in order to produce a maximum yield with minimum work effort : the main goal is to minimize risks rather than labour. Consequently, they tend to prefer working as a group and not alone, and social relationships based on mutual aid prevail over individual activities.
Carrying capacity and necessary areas
It may sometimes be necessary to calculate the arable land areas necessary to a given community. Several parameters must then be taken into account, but they can only be determined in the field, each population having its own characteristics and requirements. However, we do have a few theoretical tools at our disposal.
The concept of 'carrying capacity' was devised to determine the relationship between a given human population and the arable land it needs, within a system of swidden agriculture ; its definition is based on a limited amount of variables :
a) land available
b) land necessary per person
c) duration of fallow
d) number of years a plot will yield
e) population (see summary of this in the article by BRUSH, 1975)
The aim is to calculate the limits of population growth, to evaluate how big a population can get without causing soil degradation.
Several mathematical formulas have been put forward to calculate the carrying capacity, and we have retained two.
- Formula by ALLAN (1949) (altered by BRUSH) for calculating the carrying capacity :
A = duration of cultivation
B = duration of fallow
C = necessary area per person for average subsistence
D = total area of arable land available
- CONKLIN (1959) suggests a formula similar to the latter (using the same symbols) :
D = maximum area of arable land
C = average minimum area of cleared land necessary per person and per year
T = A+B = average minimum length of a complete agricultural cycle (duration of cultivation A + duration of fallow B)
One must imagine a reverse formula to calculate the amount of land necessary for a given population, knowing the average size of cultivated plots and the length of the agricultural cycle. One may begin by looking at the following formula :
- Formula by ALLAN (1949) to calculate the area of land necessary per person :
L = average area cultivated per person
P = fraction of arable land (%)
- One could also use the formulas used for calculating the carrying capacity, but reversing them :
C = cleared area per person
A = duration of cultivation
B = duration of fallow
It would be necessary to take into account a potential population growth so as to provide sufficient land areas and thus limit higher population densities.
The easiest way to do this (but not the most accurate) would be to add to the 'necessary area', S, to the following formula :
The traditional system is functional with low population densities.
One of the main factors of change is therefore an increase in population density, either because of natural population growth, or because of new groups settling down within the limited area in question. Population growth makes for increased competition over land ; at the same time, the economic development of these countries is anyway leading cultivators to increase their production of cash crops for export and neglect food-producing crops.
People respond in a variety of ways to the problems of population increase :
a) limitation of the size of a population (through lower birth rates or higher death rates or, more often, by emigrating to other areas) ;
b) restrictions over using available resources, by reducing the agricultural cycle ;
c) changing the system of food acquisition, by intensifying agricultural production and predation ;
d) changing techniques and choosing different systems for food acquisition.
When available land is limited, the major risk is that duration of fallow will be reduced and rotations accelerated ; this will allow for the expansion of secondary forests without giving them the time to regenerate and reach full maturity ; repeated swiddening in secondary forests is dangerous because it favours an evolution towards savanna land and then to grasslands which cannot even be used as pasture, and the continuity of the forest canopy is thus broken. It is therefore absolutely necessary to enrich fallow land.
Intensifying agriculture : lack of land implies increasing the production of each plot, but the benefit of this is lost because it also requires increasingly complex and arduous tasks (see NETTING, 1974). Moreover, when it becomes impossible to restore soil fertility with natural vegetation, one must then use fertilizers to provide the necessary energy.
As we can see, both indigenous populations and the equatorial forest are threatened by two things (other than actual forest exploitation) : extending permanent cash crops and population growth. How can one intensify agricultural production, limit shifting agriculture, and all the while preserve the forest canopy ?
All the countries in Asia have set up policies against shifting agriculture (and in this they were imitating early European colonial policies) backed by rather fallacious reasoning : swidden agriculture is accused of having led to deforestation and of destroying valuable trees that could otherwise be sold. Clearly, official policy prefers logging, profitable to the country. It only neglects one thing : agriculture aims at feeding human beings not government budgets...
Several countries in Asia urge people to abandon shifting agriculture and adopt instead permanent agriculture, irrigated rice cultivation to be precise. Though in theory the latter is more productive, changing from one technique to the other is difficult and cultivators are reluctant to do so.
Research in the Philippines has shown that one hectare of irrigated rice, cultivated on terraced fields, requires 630 days of work per year and per person, whereas a one hectare swidden plot with tubers growing on it only requires 250. Even the rice yields on either type of land are comparable : 630 days of work in the irrigated rice fields provides the Ifugao with 2427 kg of rice ; elsewhere in the Philippines, the Hanunóo produce 2 tons of mountain rice on a swidden plot of one hectare and only put in 385 days of work...
Any suggestion of improvement of swidden agriculture must therefore be put forward cautiously, bearing in mind that what one will be affecting are systems which, upto now, are the only systems that have proved capable of sustaining the populations engaged in them.
There seem to be two promising paths towards improvement : management of agricultural rotation and enriching fallow with interesting plant species.
- Agricultural rotation
Research carried out as early as 1934 in the Yangambi research centre (Zaire) by the national institute for research in agronomy in Belgian Congo (INEAL) was aimed at improving traditional subsistence agriculture and it is worth looking into it. More specifically, the idea was to develop an adequate balance between periods during which land was under cultivation and others when it was resting, advocating the so-called method of 'alternating forest strips' (see JURION & HENRY, 1967; DRACHOUSSOFF, 1992) :
- a north-south axis provides the starting point from which 100 metre-wide strips will lead off on either side, running east-west ;
- annual clearing by a group of villagers is concentrated on one strip, and they begin with those strips bearing even numbers ;
- the length of a strip is based on the number of households involved, taking into account the maximum area one person can cultivate ;
- the number of strips is determined by the length of the cycle ;
- the strips run east-west so that crops receive maximum and even exposure to sunlight ;
- strips are 100 metres wide so as to allow for normal forest regeneration and limit lateral shade on the crops ; it is thus a compromise between the requirements of production activities and the constraints of forest regeneration.
Each year, every other strip is cleared, and those that remain forested will be cleared six or seven years later (half of the total cycle).
Rotation on forest strips includes three years of food-producing crops that are intercropped over several stages : manioc and banana are planted five months apart and, while they are growing, maize and then mountain rice are also intercropped on the same plot ; as early as the second year, the plot is abandoned and there is usually a lush and prolific regrowth ; in the third year, only the stems of bananas dominate in the new growth associated with the first stages of forest regeneration. The land is then left fallow for about 12 years.
The Yangambi agricultural services had hoped to make this system gradually evolve towards permanent agriculture, going through stages during which cultivation periods would be lengthened and a fallow with umbrella trees established. However, if we look at this from the point of view of forest management and not permanent agriculture, one could consider enriching alternating strips by controlling the fallow and introducing useful tree species using the techniques of Indonesian agroforestry.
- Enriching the fallow
Populations of South-East Asia provide numerous examples of agricultural work carried out on fallow land : cultivators choose and plant useful tree species. An exemplary model is provided by the agroforests of Sumatra, the techniques of which are based on the rules of natural forest regeneration. Cultivators do not attempt to fight against the natural dynamic of the forest but on the contrary judiciously integrate the species they have chosen within this dynamic. Once the forest has recovered from agricultural activities, they replenish the tree population, one sapling at a time, using the gaps in the canopy as much as possible, and being careful to study the optimal ecological conditions for each species (see MARY & MICHON, 1987; MICHON, 1985; MICHON & BOMPARD, 1987).
Consequently, one should :
* carry out studies on
- indigenous economic and agricultural systems, bearing in mind that traditional cultivators are the most qualified experts in a balanced and lasting forest economy ;
- the possibility of restoring and improving agricultural systems of crop combination (and not monocropping) that preserve polyvarietal crops necessary to a balanced diet (and enabling people to counteract the negative effects of an economy based only on export cash crops) ;
- the improvement of food-producing arboriculture, also useful to the local economy ;
- afforestation of fallow land ;
* plan spatial organization, alternating agricultural areas and areas of
protected forest (unaffected by clearing for agricultural purposes) which would
provide supplies of species that can then be used to influence forest
regeneration on the fallow ;
* encourage long-term economic (and social) development projects, balanced
and lasting, and necessarily thought out on a regional, not national, scale if
they are to be viable.