Slash-and-burn agriculture: the search for alternatives

This remarkable volume addresses the sustainable management of tropical forests with unstinting sophistication, moving the analysis beyond clichés to the true complexities of the challenge. The world’s tropical forests, in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, are being cut down, at enormous costs to local and global biodiversity and ecosystem services. The carbon released by tropical deforestation is a significant factor in the overall increase in atmospheric green-house gases. Yet the “best bets” to deal with the challenge of tropical deforestation remain far from obvious. The studies collected here offer new conceptual tools and a rich compendium of empirical analyses that will be needed to formulate a set of viable responses to this major global challenge. The traditional interpretation of tropical deforestation has usually proceeded in something like the following way. A rising population of smallholder farmers at the forest margin—the boundary between farm and forest—leads to deforestation as forests are cut to make room for new farms. At the same time, existing farmland is abandoned because of land degradation, soil erosion, and soil nutrient depletion. The loss of existing farmland is exacerbated by the pressure of shortened fallows, caused by the rise of population densities. In this traditional view, the best way to slow or stop deforestation would be to raise productivity on existing farms in a sustainable manner—for example, through the systematic replenishment of soil nutrients, so that pressures to expand into new lands can be eased. There are of course important aspects of truth in this conventional view, but as the studies in this volume make clear, the situation is far more complex. Natural population growth on the forest margin is not the only, or even the key, driver of deforestation. Population growth often results from in-migration of settlers, rather than from the natural population increase among existing residents. Ironically, in such circumstances, intensification of agricultural techniques, even in a sustainable manner, can increase rather than decrease the rate of deforestation, by raising the profitability of farming and thereby inducing the in-migration of settlers to the forest margin. There may be a strong case for improving the productivity of agricultural practices, but that step alone may not solve the problem of deforestation

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