Shifting Cultivation: A New Old Paradigm for Managing Tropical Forests

Abstract

Shifting cultivation, or swidden farming, is often held to be the principle driving force for deforestation in tropical Asia (Myers 1993). National governments in Southeast Asia, notably in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, have been inclined to blame shifting cultivators, usually members of ethnic minorities, for rapid loss of forests (Dove 1984, Do Van Sam 1994, Le Trong Cuc 1996, Rambo 1996). In Vietnam, the official view of shifting cultivation has been particularly negative, reflecting a combination of the ethnocentric assumptions of the numerically dominant Kinh (lowland Vietnamese) about the cultural superiority of wet rice farming and the Marxist view that swiddening represents a primitive stage in the cultural evolutionary sequence (Jamieson 1991, Rambo 1995).