Alternatives to slash and burn

Tropical forests in Asia, Africa and Latin America are being rapidly transformed through slash-and-burn. Traditionally, slash-and-burn is a system for land use — shifting cultiva-tion — based on alternating food cropping periods with periods of regrowth of vegetation (fallow). Increasing population pressure has shortened the fallow periods dramatically, making the system unsustainable in many areas. Slash-and-burn is also a technique to convert forests into permanent agricultural land, or into other land use practices, including large-scale tree crops (rubber, oil palm, timber). In Asia, shifting cultivation is becoming less common and much of the slash-and-burn is related to permanent conversion of forests by smallholders, large operators and government-sponsored resettlement projects. The consequences of this are devastating, in terms of climate change, soil erosion and degradation, watershed degradation and loss of biodiversity. The Alternatives to Slash-and-Burn Programme is built around two issues — the global environ-mental effects of slash-and-burn and the technological and policy options to alleviate those effects. The programme assumes that the development of agroforestry-based forms of intensified landuse as an alternative to slash-and-burn can help to alleviate poverty and improve human welfare. By identifying alternatives to slash-and-burn and providing options from which farmers can choose, the ASB programme aims to provide benefits at a range of scales, from household to global. ASB is a system-wide initiative of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. Since it began in 1992, the programme has developed into a consortium of nine inter-national research centres and 62 national research institutes, universities and other government and non-government organizations. ICRAF is the convening centre for ASB because there is a close link between agroforestry options and alternatives to unsustainable slash-and-burn practices. ICRAF’s contributes to the ASB Programme in its research in the three humid ecoregions of Latin America, Southeast Asia and the humid lowlands of west Africa.

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