diversity of shifting cultivation cycles among small-scale farmers in peruvian amazon多样性的变化在秘鲁亚马逊地区小规模农民种植周期.pdfVIP

Vol.2, No.2, 68-77 (2011) Agricultural Sciences doi:10.4236/as.2011.22011 Diversity of shifting cultivation cycles among small-scale farmers in Peruvian Amazon 1* 1 1 1 2 Bohdan Lojka , Jan Banout , Lucie Banoutova , Vladimir Verner , Patrick Van Damme 1Institute of Tropics and Subtropics, Czech University of Life Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic; 2Laboratory of Tropical and Subtropical Agriculture and Ethnobotany, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium; * Corresponding Author: lojka@its.czu.cz Received 25 November 2010; revised 16 February 2011; accepted 15 March 2011. ABSTRACT ing cultivation to sedentary farming. Farmers in areas with a prevalence of annual cropping use Although shifting cultivation is practiced by mil- a significantly shorter fallow period, which causes lions of farmers, it is often blamed for causing a higher rate of forest degradation. As annual deforestation and keeping farmers in poverty. cropping seems to be unsustainable in relation Our study focused on the Amazon basin, where with forest degradation, farmers should either small-scale farmers widely practice shifting cul- use a longer natural fallow to sustain longer cro- tivation. The objective was to identify the diver- pping cycles, or shift to tree-based land use sy- sity in land use after initial slash-and-burn land stems. clearing among migrant peasants. Our research aimed at documenting typical crop sequences, Keywords: Agroforestry; Deforestation;