Indigenous Fallow Management (IFM) in Southeast Asia: new research exploring the promise of farmer-generated technologies to stabilize and intensify stressed Swidden systems

Throughout S.E. Asia, land-use practices involving fallow and fire are universally condemned by state goverments. Variations of swidden cultivation are viewed as primitive remnants from the past, a major causative agent in tropical deforestation, and in urgent need of reform. Despite the high priority accorded to it, research and development efforts have not been effective in identifying sustainable alternatives widely adoptable by resource-poor swidden communities. Altough research often rightly focused on improved fallow management as a promising point of intervention, the value of this work was generally comprised by its top-down approach. Fallow enrichment trials tended to be researcher driven almost completely divorced from farmer circumstances, and even superior technologies were seldom adopted the research stations perimeters. There are a compelling array of axamples in the region's uplands where increasing land use pressures have motivated swidden farmers to draw on intimate knowledge of their local environments in innovating succesful indigenous fallow management (IFM) practices. Until recently, the subaltern voices of shifting cultivators have received short shrift from research efforts, their lifestyles and resource management practices perceived as the crux of the problem and having little to contribute to solutions. In response to growing recognition of ITK's potential in local problem solving and the need for more bottom up approaches to R&D efforts, this IDRC supported strategies to intensity shifting cultivation in S.E. Asia. The international Centre for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF) is the lead agency in coordinating this work through its S.E. Asian regional office in Bogor, Indonesia. Based on their research commitment to promising IFM technologies, a core group of five national institutions throughout the region have been assembled to form the nucleus of the network. Together, their research sites are representative of the major areas where collapsing swidden systems are endemic - in northern Vietnam, nothern Laos, south-western China, north-easthern India, and the nothern Phillipines. As a point of departure, each collaborating institution is preparing initial diagnostic papers on cogent IFM practices in their respective study sites. Their findings will be presented at a regional wrokshop in Bogor, Indonesia on June 23-27, 1997. This workshop intends to review a wide spectrum of case studies and synthesize current knowledge of IFM in the regiob. In particular, participants collection scientific competence will be brought to bear in critiquing the five partner institutions papers and developing a strategic research agenda for the future. Building on the momentum of the workshop, the core members will jointly plan a set of linked, paralell research projects to be conducted under the IFM Network over the following year. ICRAF scientist will assist in guiding this process, provide training on methodologies to be used, and continue to supply technical backstopping as the research progresses. Cross visits betweeen institutions will help strengthen the network; anable peer review of each research programme within network; and promote pooling of knowledge and experience in problem solving. A conclud ing seminar will technologies, and axplore prospects for NARS to build on this work in the national research programmes of Asian Countries. This work will further explore the relationship of IFM technologies, their promise and the peripheral position of indigenous minorities in S.E. Asia with the intent of raising the value such practices in the eyes of both researchers and policy makers. This will assist formulate more robust arguments for empowermant of local communities to manage their own natural resource bases.