Shifting cultivation and Taungya

Abstract

Shifting Cultivation or swidden farming is considered the oldest form of agriculture. It refers to the traditional, centuries-old farming system, in which land under natural vegetation is cleared, cropped - usually with food crops - for a few years, and then left untended allowing the natural vegetation to regenerate; a few years later, the farmer returns to that land, clears it again, and resumes crop cultivation; and the "crop - fallow - crop - fallow -" cycle is repeated indefinitely. Despite decades of efforts to eradicate, improve, or replace it, the practice in some form is still followed in about 300 million ha in the tropics. Although denigrated as resource-depleting and environmentally destructive, these traditional practices offer insights into the role of the woody vegetation in recouping the soil fertility that is depleted during the cropping phase. Taungya is a special form of land management based on the well-known German system of Waldfeldbau (cultivation of agricultural crops in forests) and was developed in Burma (today's Myanmar) in the mid-1800s as an improvement to the traditional slash-and-burn type of shifting cultivation, primarily for promoting forest plantation establishment with the help of the land-hungry farmers. The practice became so popular that most of the forest plantations in the tropical world, particularly in Asia and Africa, were established in the taungya way. Decades of research to find improvements and/or alternatives to shifting cultivation has established the importance of retaining or incorporating woody vegetation for sustaining soil productivity as a key scientific foundation of modern agroforestry. Tropical alley cropping and improved fallows were the two major tropical agroforestry-research efforts in the late 1990s based on the concept of fallow improvement.