Project Title: Mapping
Resource Tenure in the Mekong Basin: Yunnan, Laos, and Northern Thailand
Funding: Rockefeller
Brothers Foundation
Principal Investigators: Dr. Urivan Tan-Kim-Yong, Chiang Mai University
Dr.
Xu Jianchu, Kunming Institute of Botany
Dr.
Jefferson Fox, East-West Center
Scientists, resource managers, and planners increasingly recognize that land-use change is a major driver of global change, through its interaction with climate, ecosystem processes, biogeochemical cycles, and biodiversity. Understanding land-use changes requires scientists and resource managers to consider the role of human behavior, particularly the roles played by individual farmers, decision-makers, institutions—including land tenure, and the inter-level integration of processes at one level with those at other levels of aggregation. As Nunes and Auge (1999) point out, a village connected by paved roads to world markets feels the pressure of commodity price shifts internationally a great deal more than communities with poor road infrastructure, and are likely to make very different decision about land use. Without understanding the human dynamics behind land-use change, we cannot understand changes in land cover, nor predict the outcomes of policy interventions.
Shifting cultivation, or
swidden farming is the major farming system found in the uplands of mainland
Southeast Asia. Swiddening has been
practiced in the region for centuries, if not millennia, and consists of felling
trees in a patch of forest during the dry season, burning them before the onset
of the rainy season to release the nutrients stored in the biomass, cultivating
the cleared fields for periods of varying length, and fallowing the fields to
allow secondary vegetation to regrow for periods of varying length. Alcorn (1990) calls swidden farming “managed
deforestation,” a system built around patchy, pulsed removal of trees but not
of the forest. Indigenous farmers work to manage deforestation in sequential
agroforestry systems that integrate secondary successional vegetation (SV)¾everything from grass and bushes, to young open-canopy
tree communities, to mature closed-canopy tree communities.
Fieldwork by scientists
participating in this proposal has led us to believe that even the areas
usually classified as forest may be more accurately described as intermediate
or advanced SV. In prior work using aerial photographs and satellite imagery,
we found that SV covered 88% of the landscape in a portion of northern
Thailand, 84% of the upper Da watershed in northern Vietnam, 92% of the
landscape in southern Yunnan, and 77% of the landscape covered in northeastern
Cambodia (Fox et al., 1995, Fox et al., 1999, Xu et al., 1999, and Fox 1999a).
Our research (Long et al., 1999) also suggests that land-use change has begun
to occur in the region as farmers switch from swidden cultivation to cash crops
including both paddy rice and plantation tree crops. While the number of
hectares planted to these crops may still be relatively inconsequential, annual
rates of change are significant. These results suggest that most upland areas
of Asia will eventually see a major change in land-use with the conversion from
swidden agriculture to commercial crops and a change in land cover from
secondary vegetation to permanent mono-cultural agriculture albeit tree crops
in many cases.
It is important to generate baseline data on how local resource management systems are changing in the wake of commodification of resources in order to understand how these changes may affect land cover, sustainable resource use, and landscape transformation (Nunes and Auge1999). Permanent agriculture could result in a tree-dominated land cover (e.g., rubber, palm oil, cardamom, or tea), or it could result in a land cover composed of annuals (e.g., maize, cassava, and upland rice). In either case, biodiversity, as measured by the number of species found on the landscape, would probably decline (Nagata 1996). There is also an urgent need for a comprehensive study of traditional land-use practices and systems of customary tenure in order to recognize and protect the rights of the indigenous peoples (Peluso 1992). The proposed study seeks to build regional and national capacity for documenting and monitoring SV in upland areas of Asia. Through this analysis we seek to develop a better understanding of the effects swidden agriculture has had on land-cover change in the region over the last 20 years and to predict probable consequences for landscape ecology, biodiversity, and household economies and resource tenure systems of current trends toward permanent agriculture.
This proposal will be constructed around three
research questions: what will be the effect of converting swidden fields to
permanent agriculture on (1) biological diversity; (2) household economies and
resource tenure; and (3) how will the cumulative impact of these changes affect
larger landscapes both in terms of landscape ecology as well as levels of
complexity and diversity of management by multiple (sometimes multi-ethnic)
groups?
Methodology and Study
Areas
Initial
image analysis and field observations will be conducted within 3 to 4
case-study sites in which the participating scientists have already worked
(Figure 1). These sites include Menglong Township and Weixi county in Yunnan
China; Chiang Rai and Payao in Thailand; and 1 or 2 sites in Laos in
collaboration with the CIDA project being conducted by Philip Hirsch and Peter
Vandergeest.
Activity 1: Develop a regional land-cover classification
of secondary vegetation in the 1980s and 90s.
This project will integrate the
development of a spatial database with information collected through interviews
with farmers and other key informants and an analysis of relevant socioeconomic
policies. This database will serve as a framework for analyzing changes in land
cover and forest patterns through time, as well as a tool for analyzing the
information and insights collected in interviews and policy analysis (Fox et
al. 1995). A spatial database of the study sites will be developed using aerial
photography if available, Landsat TM imagery (1985 and 92) from the Tropical
Rain Forest Information Center at Michigan State University (Southeast Asia
Landsat Pathfinder Project), and more recent cloud free TM imagery as
available.
Activity 2: Develop
an ecological description of the different land-cover classes
Project scientists will conduct field observations to
enable us to ground-truth classifications of satellite imagery as described
above, and to characterize land-cover properties. The field surveys of the
vegetation species composition and canopy structural characteristics will be
carried out under the supervision of the individual collaborators with the
assistance of advanced students from a variety of disciplines in the national
universities we are collaborating with as well as local villagers in study
areas. The technique used will be a participatory biodiversity assessment. We
intend to integrate the biological investigations with an ethno botanical
examination, focusing on local use(s) of the different plant species found in
each land cover type.
Activity
3: Develop a cultural description of the land-use practices and tenure systems
found in the different sites.
Swidden agriculture is a system that has nurtured and developed a wide diversity of crops both in swidden fields as well as fallows. The reason for the cultivator’s ‘tolerance’ becomes clear when one examines the role of these various plant species in the household economy. This produce contributes to household nutrition, health, cash income, and economic security among other things. The conversion of large areas from swidden to permanent agriculture will alter land cover in a manner that will reduce the area or complexity of biological diversity in the landscape. Given the communities’ use of products from swidden and secondary forest, such land cover change could significantly impact the welfare of upland communities. Data collected through key informant interviews and household surveys in the study areas will focus on such products, both market and non-market goods, and the factors that affect their protection, cultivation, use and commerce. The examination of these data together with the vegetative survey data will highlight potential impacts to household welfare, both physical and financial, of sweeping changes in land cover. This analysis, in essence examining the human dimension of changing land use and land cover, will highlight the implications for government policy, extending beyond the immediate sectors of agriculture and forestry to all government policies which affect development in the rural areas.
We will develop a
socioeconomic database that is keyed to the spatial information database (GIS)
through interviews with key informants including traditional village chiefs,
community leaders, and older people who can provide histories of land-use
dynamics in the study areas. Household interviews will be conducted with
individual farmers in order to collect data on how families arrange their
swidden fallow plots across the landscape, how they collaborate with
neighboring farmers and communities for allocating and zoning land use, and how
they control fires. We will assist local
people to develop sketch maps delineating customary land-use boundaries, tenure
boundaries, sites of conflicts, and the location of valuable resources.
Important boundaries demarcating features such as community-protected forests,
and mining roads and pits will be mapped using GPS technology and the guidance
of local people.
Activity 4: Develop a holistic view of the
landscape.
We will use the spatial information database to scale-up our results from household plots to an aggregation of plots at a landscape scale. In this way we will attempt to identify and understand varying levels of complexity and diversity as managed by the multi-ethnic groups who live and work together to convert the natural landscape into a managed landscape that ensures their joint livelihood. We will select representative landscapes to understand complexity and diversity as influenced by local groups and we will compare these landscapes with found in buffer zones and protected watersheds (Urivan, I’m not sure what you mean).
Available Resources
Image
analysis will be conducted in the EWC Spatial Information Laboratory that is
equipped with four Windows NT workstations networked together and a Sun Sparc 2
UNIX workstation. The lab utilizes Arc/Info, Arc View, and Idrisi GIS software
and Erdas Imagine image processing software.
Links to Policy
The research project is designed not only to enhance the knowledge of the scientific community regarding the interaction between human and natural systems, but also to provide decision makers with information and tools to enable them to better understand and predict environmental response, especially biological and human responses, to land-cover changes. Understanding these processes is critical if policy makers and planners are to create the conditions that promote environmentally sound and sustainable development of upland areas. If urgency in this respect exists anywhere today, it is in the montane region of northern Southeast Asia, headwaters of the river systems that serve the important rice-growing areas of the Mekong and the Red River deltas, where recent economic and institutional changes have generated some of the fastest rates of economic growth in the entire Asia region. Project results will be presented and discussed in a regional meeting of scientists, policy makers, and development specialists. The project will actively seek out methods of disseminating its results to decision-makers and will seek their input into what kind of research would be most useful for affecting land policies related to land use and land cover change.
Alcorn, J. 1990. Indigenous agroforestry strategies meeting farmers’ needs. In A. Anderson (ed.) Alternatives to Deforestation: Steps Toward Sustainable Use of the Amazon Rain Forest. New York: Columbia University Press.
Fox, J., Krummel J, Yarnasarn S, Ekasingh M, and Podger N. 1995. Land use and landscape dynamics in northern Thailand: Assessing change in three upland watersheds. Ambio 24(6): 328-334.
Fox, J.,
Dao Minh Truong, A Terry Rambo, Nghiem Phuong Tuyen, Le Trong Cuc, and Stephen
Leisz. 1999. Shifting cultivation without deforestation: A case study in the
mountains of northwestern Vietnam. Forthcoming BioScience.
Fox, J. 1999a Mapping a changing landscape in
northeastern Cambodia. Forthcoming Conservation Biology.
Fox, J. 1999b. Land-use and Land-cover Change in Montane
Mainland Southeast Asia. Invited paper prepared for meeting on land use and
land cover change sponsored by the National Institute for Environmental
Studies, Tscuba, Japan, January 1999.
Long Chun-lin, Jefferson Fox, Lu Xing, Gao Lihong, Cai
Kui, and Wang Jieru. 1999. State Policies, Markets, Land-Use Practices, and
Common Property: Fifty Years of Change in Yunnan, China. Mountain Research
and Development 19(2):133-139.
Nagata, H. 1996.
The effect of forest disturbance on avian community structure at two lowland
forests in peninsular Malaysia. In A. Abidin, A. Hasan, Z. Akbar (eds.)
Conservation and Faunal Biodiversity in Malaysia. Bangi: Universiti Malaysia.
Nunes, C. and J. Auge, editors. 1999. Land-use and land-cover change (LUCC): Implementation Strategy. IGBP Report 48 and IHDP Report 10. Stockholm: IGBP Secretariat, Royal Swedish Academy of Science.
Peluso, N. 1992. The political ecology of extraction and extractive reserves in East Kalimantan, Indonesia. Development and Change 23:49-60.