‘Shifting Cultivation, Gender and REDD+’* is the name of a meeting I attended yesterday at the office of a USAID contractor in Washington, DC. It was a refreshing combination of GIS and remote sensing experts on the one hand, and anthropologists, on the other; and it concerned, among other things, two large scale and comparatively long-term projects in Central and West Africa (CARPE and STEWARD, respectively). I was there as a ‘gender expert’ with some experience in the region.
The fact that the meeting took place at all was something of an anomaly. Shifting cultivation has been a serious bugaboo from the standpoint of the forestry world (in which REDD+ planning and activities have been most directly incorporated). From colonial days and into the present, foresters have generally considered shifting cultivation to be a destructive and primitive form of agriculture, a direct threat to the trees foresters spend their lives trying to grow, tend and harvest. National policymakers in developing countries have by and large accepted this negative interpretation, and continue to see shifting cultivators as a kind of national embarrassment—‘primitive people’ in their midst. Many, while generally tolerating it as too common to police effectively, render it technically illegal. So the global policy arenas in general and the forestry world in particular have represented a very inhospitable world for shifting cultivators.
Additionally, many shifting cultivation systems are what has been termed ‘female dominated’. In many parts of Africa, food crop production has been dominated by women—a pattern considered bizarre (perhaps even unbelievable) by many of the (generally male) American agricultural experts who offered technical guidance throughout the mid to late 1900s. Like the European colonialists that preceded the Americans, their images of desirable farms included rows of permanent mono-crops, managed by men; and such interpretations were reinforced by economists’ analyses, which were often marred by inaccurate assumptions about how these differing worlds functioned.
There has been a small, but not completely insubstantial, number of researchers—anthropologists, geographers, agronomists, ethnobotanists–who have looked carefully into shifting cultivation systems in sites all over the tropical world. These researchers, focusing on intact systems in geographically specific locales, with the associated human cultures, have found differing, and much more complex realities than those seen and portrayed by (most) foresters and national policymakers. Rather than destructive systems that cut trees, plant crops and move on—-as typically portrayed—-many of these systems are complex combinations of agriculture and forestry. Many shifting cultivators creatively use (and create) forest plots of varying ages, to maintain access to useful and varying products while allowing the soil to regenerate in these partially fallowed lands.** Indeed, virtually all the lush forests of the tropics have persisted for millennia in co-existence with such farmers.
There are many variations of shifting cultivation, some more useful as sources of insight than others. But many provide otherwise unavailable information about species, their usefulness, their patterns of growth and/or behaviour; the systems are flexible and resilient, responsive to changes in context and climate; and they maintain a largely unmeasured but substantial amount of biomass—if the true area of each farm is included in calculations. Women’s active involvement in such systems provides a possible entrée for those of us who see improving women’s well-being globally (a mandate of the Millennium Development Goals) as a significant component of attempts to improve human well being.
But REDD+, situated as it is within the forestry world, has been moving in a direction that ignores these opportunities for flexible adaptation to climate change, and misses a potential REDD+ innovation with both emissions reduction and human welfare advantages. At the same time, the REDD+ policies being proposed to ‘stop slash and burn’ spell danger for the people who practice these complex, resilient, and in many ways forest-friendly systems. Many who have studied shifting cultivation, or ‘swidden agriculture,’*** see this as both a fundamental error of interpretation, based on a profound misunderstanding of how such (variable) systems function, and as a threat to the well being of millions of swiddeners.
Almost all ‘solutions’ to the ‘problem’ of shifting cultivation include policies to obliterate it. These solutions include
- resettlement (routinely shown to have adverse effects on those resettled),
- agricultural interventions (which typically strive to import pre-selected technologies that wreak havoc with the local division of labour, ignore people’s differing value systems, and usually fail). There’s another irony related to such attempts: They essentially encourage people to adopt permanent agriculture, wherein forests completely disappear! Biodiversity and forest cover in shifting cultivation systems, including the forest fallows, are far greater than in conventional agriculture.
- criminalization and related enforcement of anti-shifting cultivation laws, essentially rendering people’s whole way of life illegal—a significant abrogation of their human rights and a direct attack on their means of subsistence.
In our USAID meeting, which included a number of the people who had conducted indepth research on shifting cultivation systems, we shared our views on the positive aspects of shifting cultivation. I argued for longer term, site-specific involvement with communities, to analyze the local system and develop collaborative solutions, based on existing practices. Such an approach is even more important when trying to understand and build on women’s lives and goals, than when dealing with the men of a community. There are too many constraints to gaining quick access to women: lower levels of literacy and education, greater time constraints, assumptions from those conducting surveys that men can ‘represent’ women’s views, norms that inhibit interaction with outsiders and can even prevent women from expressing their views at all. Such constraints, rather than reducing our commitment to addressing their concerns as ‘too much trouble,’ indicate the urgency of doing so—women are half the global population!
But REDD+ decisions are being made now—vital decisions that could have wretched implications for local people, including loss of their lands, their productive assets. So, although I believe that real solutions will only be found when local people (including women!) have significant voice in decisions about their futures, a useful intermediate step is to involve policymakers with active local researchers in recurrent meetings to discuss and share preliminary findings, as the substantive, long term, collaborative research progresses. Such involvement can build a ‘community of practice’, improve our collective understanding and result in sharing of findings within a region. Insofar as citizens of the countries involved are active in these communities of practice, a sense of national ownership of collaborative methods and of the ensuing results can develop. Perhaps real changes in people’s attitudes about shifting cultivation can be brought about—-to the benefit of both forests and the people who live in and around them.
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* Any get-together at USAID [United States Agency for International Development] is plagued by acronyms. REDD+ refers to an international concern entitled Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation’. Additional acronyms about to appear include: CARPE – Central Africa Regional Program for the Environment, and STEWARD – Sustainable and Thriving Environments for West African Regional Development.
** For descriptions of one such system in Borneo see
Colfer, Carol J. Pierce and Richard G. Dudley 1993. Shifting Cultivators of Indonesia: Managers or Marauders of the forest? Rice Production and Forest Use among the Uma’ Jalan of East Kalimantan. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
Colfer, Carol J. Pierce, Nancy Lee Peluso and See Chung Chin 1997. Beyond Slash and Burn: Building on Indigenous Management of Borneo’s Tropical Rain Forests. Bronx, N.Y.: New York Botanical Garden.
Colfer, Carol J Pierce 2009. The Longhouse of the Tarsier: Changing Landscapes, Gender and Well Being in Borneo. Phillips, Maine: Borneo Research Council, in cooperation with CIFOR and UNESCO.
*** Swidden is the term used to describe the agricultural plot (usually planted with food crops) within the overall mosaic of agricultural and forested plots.