Showing papers on "Subsistence agriculture published in 2006"

Towards the development of miombo fruit trees as commercial tree crops in southern africa

Abstract: Many rural households rely on indigenous fruit trees as sources of cash and subsistence in the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC), but until recently there has been little effort to cultivate, improve or add value to these fruits. Since 1989 the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF: now the World Agroforestry Centre) initiated research-and-development work on more than 20 priority indigenous fruit trees in five SADC countries aimed at improving income in rural communities. A participatory approach was used in all stages of their domestication, product development and commercialization. Country-specific priority species were identified in five countries based on discussions with a wide range of users. These species have now become the focus of a regional tree domestication programme. An impact analysis indicates that a robust domestication programme will create incentives for farmer-led investment in the cultivation of indigenous fruit trees, as an alternative to wild...

Recent Land Use and Livelihood Transitions in Northern Laos

Abstract: Landscapes in the mountainous north of Lao People's Democratic Republic (hereafter Lao PDR or Laos) are undergoing rapid transformation as road access is being improved and the area is integrated into the regional economies of Southeast Asia, particularly China. Rural livelihoods in the upland areas, long based on subsistence agricultural production, are changing as more households engage in the market economy. This study assesses land use changes from 1993 to 2000, as well as agricultural production in 4 northern provinces of Laos: Luang Prabang, Oudomxay, Bokeo, and Luang Namtha. The spatial data available for this region are limited, but several trends are apparent from 1993: the area of traditional upland agriculture and swidden farming (ie shifting agriculture) has decreased, while permanent intensive agriculture has increased. There is some evidence that forest cover has increased since 1997, probably as a result of the succession of abandoned swidden areas to secondary forest, but the qual...

The role of wild grasses in subsistence and sedentism: new evidence from the northern Fertile Crescent

Abstract: Sedentism is usually regarded as a pre-condition for the development of crop husbandry in Southwest Asia and, consequently, sedentary pre-agrarian sites are an important focus of research on the origins of agriculture. It is often assumed that wild grasses were as important for hunter-gatherers as domesticated cereals were for early farmers, and that wild grass exploitation may therefore have had a critical role in enabling sedentism. Results from the analysis of archaeobotanical assemblages from Hallan Cemi, Demirkoy, Qermez Dere and M'lefaat, and comparison with those of other sedentary pre-agrarian sites in Southwest Asia, challenge the role often attributed to the exploitation of grasses at this time. Archaeobotanical and ethnographical evidence instead suggests that hunter-gatherers took an opportunistic approach to the resources available and their subsistence strategies were not necessarily centred on grasses and ‘wild cereals’.

Feminization of agriculture: Trends and driving forces

Abstract: Women's work in agriculture has become more visible over the last few decades. In part, this is due to research and data collection that has attempted to more accurately measure women's activities in rural areas. But, more importantly, women have broadened and deepened their involvement in agricultural production over the last few decades as they increasingly shoulder the responsibility for household survival and respond to economic opportunities in commercial agriculture. This trend has been called the feminization of agriculture. This paper will describe how women have increased their labor in two types of agricultural production -- smallholder production and agro-export agriculture -- and the economic and socio-cultural forces that are driving this trend. Finally, this paper examines whether women's participation in income-producing activities, whether as wage workers or as family workers in cash cropping, contributes to empowerment and improves their status within the household.

Health benefits of physical activity

Abstract: For a substantial proportion of the population in impoverished nations, physical activity is more or less essential to earning a livelihood, rather than being just another activity aimed toward better health. To make ends meet, a subsistence farmer or manual labourer must start early in the morning

From Farmers to Merchants, Voluntary Conversions and Diaspora: A Human Capital Interpretation of Jewish History

Abstract: From the end of the second century C.E., Judaism enforced a religious norm requiring Jewish fathers to educate their sons. We present evidence supporting our thesis that this change in the religious and social norm had a major influence on Jewish economic and demographic history. First, the high individual and community cost of educating children in subsistence farming economies (2nd to 7th centuries) prompted voluntary conversions, which account for a large share of the reduction in the size of the Jewish population from 4.5 million to 1.2 million. Second, the Jewish farmers who invested in education, gained the comparative advantage and incentive to enter skilled occupations during the vast urbanization in the newly developed Muslim Empire (8th and 9th centuries) and they actually did select themselves into these occupations. Third, as merchants the Jews invested even more in education---a pre-condition for the extensive mailing network and common court system that endowed them with trading skills demanded all over the world. Fourth, the Jews generated a voluntary diaspora by migrating within the Muslim Empire, and later to western Europe where they were invited to settle as high skill intermediaries by local rulers. By 1200, the Jews were living in hundreds of towns from England and Spain in the West to China and India in the East. Fifth, the majority of world Jewry (about one million) lived in the Near East when the Mongol invasions in the 1250s brought this region back to a subsistence farming and pastoral economy in which many Jews found it difficult to enforce the religious norm regarding education, and hence, voluntarily converted, exactly as it had happened centuries earlier.

Knowing the land: soil and land resource evaluation and indigenous knowledge

Abstract: . Scientific land and soil resource surveys have had only limited impacts locally on development and extension practice in the tropics. They are thought to have little relevance for subsistence farmers. Their failure to accommodate local social and cultural priorities is a factor. Soil scientists have, until recently, given little attention to others’ understanding of soil or ‘ethnopedology’. The incorporation of indigenous soil and land resource knowledge has recently been advocated to improve their relevance. But a common error is uncritically to impose a western scientific model, which may distort understanding. The ill-informed, decontextualised knowledge that results may even promote negative interventions. This paper criticises the narrow idea of ‘indigenous technical knowledge’, citing evidence from Papua New Guinea, Bangladesh and Indonesia. While we find farmers consistently use some of the same information as scientists to assess soils, their definitions of soils and land types are often at odds. Scientists identify classes by a range of technically assessed properties, whereas farmers may not. Their more holistic approach also accounts in part for the disjunction, frequently incorporating exotic social and cultural aspects. The wider use of indigenous soil notions in agrotechnology transfer may be limited too by some of their intrinsic characteristics, inclined to be location specific, and culturally relative.

Collaborating to conserve large mammals in Southeast Asia.

Abstract: Depressed mammal densities characterize the interior of many Southeast Asian protected areas, and are the result of commercial and subsistence hunting. Local people are part of this problem but can participate in solutions through improved partnerships that incorporate local knowledge into problem diagnosis. The process of involving local people helps build a constituency that is more aware of its role (positive and negative) in a protected area and generates site-specific conservation assessments for management planning. We illustrate the practical details of initiating such a partnership through our work in a Thai wildlife sanctuary. Many protected areas in Southeast Asia present similar opportunities. In local workshops, village woodsmen were led through ranking exercises to develop a spatially explicit picture of 20-year trends in the abundance of 31 mammal species and to compare species-specific causes for declines. Within five taxonomic groups, leaf monkeys (primates), porcupines (rodents), tigers (large carnivores), civets (small carnivores), and elephants (ungulates) had declined most severely (37-74%). Commercial hunting contributed heavily to extensive population declines for most species, and subsistence hunting was locally significant for some small carnivores, leaf monkeys, and deer. Workshops thus clarified which species were at highest risk of local extinction, where the most threatened populations were, and causes for these patterns. Most important, they advanced a shared problem definition, thereby unlocking opportunities for collaboration. As a result, local people and sanctuary managers have increased communication, initiated joint monitoring and patrolling, and established wildlife recovery zones. Using local knowledge has limitations, but the process of engaging local people promotes collaborative action that large mammals in Southeast Asia need.

Linking Trees on Farms with Biodiversity Conservation in Subsistence Farming Systems in Nepal

Abstract: The Kingdom of Nepal extends 800 km east to west along the southern slopes of the Himalayas. Because of its biogeographical position, Nepal contains biological elements of both the Indo-Malayan and Palaearctic realms. Beside the trees in forest ecosystems, a large number of tree species are maintained on farms as part of subsistence farming systems. The role of these trees in ensuring the sustainability of agricultural production and the importance of traditional farming systems for the conservation of crop diversity have been well documented. However, the status of farm trees and their role in biodiversity conservation are poorly documented. This paper presents a case study of two villages in the western middle hills of Nepal. It highlights the role of traditional agroforestry practices for the conservation of tree diversity and argues that farms can be considered biodiversity reservoirs. Farm trees help to reduce pressure on community and government forests and create a favorable environment for many plant and animal species. Farm trees also provide social functions in that households with many farm trees no longer exercise their communal rights to extract grass products from community forests, which in turn benefits poor and disadvantaged households. The paper discusses possibilities to improve the role of farm trees in biodiversity conservation. It argues for the development of mechanisms such as tax exemptions and conservation credits that provide benefits to rural communities as compensation for their local and global environmental services including biodiversity conservation.

Forests, marketization, livelihoods and the poor in the Lao PDR

Abstract: The Lao PDR is making the transition from subsistence to cash, and command to market. Rural communities are being drawn ever more tightly into the embrace of the market economy and of the central state. The construction of roads, schools and health centres, the provision of credit and new crops and technologies, and the arrival of traders and the panoply of the consumer economy are all, in their different ways, remoulding rural economy and society. This paper looks at one aspect of this multi-stranded process of agrarian transformation: the role and place of forests and, in particular, non-timber forest products, in rural people's lives and livelihoods. The paper highlights the contradictory and uneven livelihood-eroding/enhancing effects of these transformations. In many upland areas of Laos livelihoods are being squeezed from ‘below’ by environmental degradation and from ‘above’ by the operation of government policies and, more generally, by evolving market relations. While market pessimists see market integration as a largely destructive process, the paper highlights the opportunities that market integration can provide through diversification and livelihood reorientation. The challenge is that these opportunities are unequally available and are likely to promote social differentiation. Some households find themselves in a position to embrace new opportunities while others are forced to continue to rely on a declining and degrading forest resource. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

What happens to traditional knowledge and use of natural resources when people migrate

Abstract: The study investigates traditional knowledge of forest plants in a community (La Quetzal) inhabited by people who returned to Guatemala at the end of the civil war, after 10–12 years in exile in Southern Mexico, and now are in the process of constructing a new community in the Lacandon jungle in the Peten, Guatemala. We ask if the basis of knowledge and the use of natural resources change when people migrate. The relevance of vascular plant diversity for consumption and other daily needs of the population is explored. Relatively few species are presently used, with the exception of timber species, where knowledge seems to be increasing. Traditional knowledge has been maintained in certain areas such as medicine. Nature as such is regarded as important primarily as potential monetary capital and not for its subsistence capital. We find that the refugee situation has led to the introduction of global consumption patterns. Still there continues to be a dynamic local intuitive knowledge arising directly from practical experiences. Two interlinked factors have been the driving forces altering the knowledge and the use of natural resources by the people in La Quetzal: Change in the natural environment and change in the social and economic environment.

Why do parents make their children work? A test of the poverty hypothesis in rural areas of Burkina Faso

Abstract: It is often argued that child labour is caused by poverty. However, much child labour takes place in rural areas characterized by substantial labour market imperfections. A model of rural household labour supply is developed that provides testable implications for two versions of the poverty hypothesis: that child labour is due to a binding subsistence constraint and that child leisure is a luxury good. We find that in rural Burkina Faso children do not provide labour to meet households' subsistence needs and that child leisure is a normal good. The evidence suggests that labour market imperfections are a main reason for using child labour.

From Farmers to Merchants, Voluntary Conversions and Diaspora: A Human Capital Interpretation of Jewish History

Abstract: From the end of the second century C.E., Judaism enforced a religious norm requiring Jewish fathers to educate their sons. We present evidence supporting our thesis that this change in the religious and social norm had a major influence on Jewish economic and demographic history. First, the high individual and community cost of educating children in subsistence farming economies (2nd to 7th centuries) prompted voluntary conversions, which account for a large share of the reduction in the size of the Jewish population from 4.5 million to 1.2 million. Second, the Jewish farmers who invested in education, gained the comparative advantage and incentive to enter skilled occupations during the vast urbanization in the newly developed Muslim Empire (8th and 9th centuries) and they actually did select themselves into these occupations. Third, as merchants the Jews invested even more in education --- a pre-condition for the extensive mailing network and common court system that endowed them with trading skills demanded all over the world. Fourth, the Jews generated a voluntary diaspora by migrating within the Muslim Empire, and later to western Europe where they were invited to settle as high skill intermediaries by local rulers. By 1200, the Jews were living in hundreds of towns from England and Spain in the West to China and India in the East. Fifth, the majority of world Jewry (about one million) lived in the Near East when the Mongol invasions in the 1250s brought this region back to a subsistence farming and pastoral economy in which many Jews found it difficult to enforce the religious norm regarding education, and hence, voluntarily converted, exactly as it had happened centuries earlier.

The Occurrence of Cereal Cultivation in China

Abstract: This paper examines the progress and remaining problems on the occurrence of cereal cultivation in China, which led to agriculture, and discusses some related theoretical issues Based on currently available data, it is argued that the occurrence of cereal cultivation in China was associated with and related to the climatic and environmental changes after the last glacial epoch, the occurrence of new technology, including the manufacturing of pottery, and the adoption of a broad-spectrum subsistence strategy, whereas sedentism does not seem to be a prerequisite for this cultural change The transition from hunting-gathering to agriculture in China seems to have been a gradual process, and foraging remained a subsistence strategy of the early farmers The occurrence of cereal cultivation in China differed from that in other core areas, demonstrating the diversity of human cultures and contributing to our understanding of the origin and development of agriculture in the world

Subsistence Response to Market Shocks

Abstract: Microeconomic models posit that transaction costs isolate subsistence producers from output market shocks. We integrate microeconomic models of many heterogeneous households into a general equilibrium model and show that supply on subsistence farms may respond, in apparently perverse ways, to changes in output market prices. Price shocks in markets for staple goods are transmitted to subsistence producers through interactions in factor markets. In the case presented, a decrease in the market price of maize reduces wages and land rents, stimulating maize production by subsistence households; however, real incomes of subsistence households fall.

A Preliminary Review of Neotropical Primates in the Subsistence and Symbolism of Indigenous Lowland South American Peoples

Abstract: This article provides a review of selected literature of nonhuman primates in the subsistence and symbolism of indigenous lowland South American groups. While few works have focused specifically on the relationship between human and nonhuman primates in Amazonia and the surrounding areas, a number of ethnographic works do incorporate information about the roles of monkeys in varied groups. The section on subsistence focuses on the use of primates as food, including preferences, avoidances, and taboos. The section on symbolism focuses on the role of monkeys in myths, folklore, and in delineating the humanity/animality divide.

Local economic development and marketing of urban produced food

Abstract: This chapter deals with the socio-economic impact of urban agriculture on income generation, poverty alleviation, urban food supply, livelihoods, as well as indirect costs and benefits for society including environmental externalities. Two levels of analysis are considered to assess this impact: the household and the city. The assessment of social and economic impact at the city level suffers more from lack of data than is the case at the household level. A main question is whether urban agriculture should be seen as an informal, residual, subsistence activity or as one that can shift from simple to enlarged reproduction of urban food, by making the best of its proximity to urban consumers and sustaining incomes in the long run. (Resume d'auteur)

The role of wild food plants in poverty alleviation and biodiversity conservation in tropical countries

Abstract: Recent research linking poverty alleviation and forest conservation has frequently focused on the potential contribution of the commercialization of Non-Timber Forest Products (NTFPs), and has consequently emphasized incomes from NTFPs rather than their consumption This paper aims to understand the role played by the consumption of wild food plants in the livelihood of rural populations Two methods of evaluation are used to estimate the value of the wild food plants consumed by Pwo Karen people living in the Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary in western Thailand The first calculates the time needed to gather the wild food plants (1463 days/year per household), and the second uses the prices of commercial substitutes in the market to estimate the number of days household members would have to engage in paid work if they switched to commercial food crops (143 days/year) The paper concludes that consuming wild food plants is an efficient method of subsistence that should be encouraged If it is not e

Forgotten Roots of the Green City: Subsistence Gardening in Columbus, Ohio, 1900-1940

Abstract: Subsistence gardens were a significant land use in the Columbus, Ohio metropolitan area from 1900 to 1940. Their existence, however, was materially erased from the city and discursively erased from its history after that period. This paper investigates the processes of that erasure, particularly in the American Addition neighborhood of Columbus, concentrating on the articulation of an urban normative that made such land uses appear contrary to "modern" urban development. At the same time, the existence of such practices and landscapes in the city was explained away by a crisis narrative of the garden that helped to support the idea that such practices did not produce "normal" urban spaces. The simultaneous material and discursive colonization of subsistence gardens as "relief" measures during the Great Depression left these landscapes and areas dependent on the City of Columbus, under whose control they were transformed into more "appropriate" cityscapes.

Agroforestry: the new old paradigm for Asian food security.

Abstract: Rising population pressure and urbanization, coupled with land degradation, soil salinization, and global warming are causing food insufficiency in large parts of Asia Agroforestry, or woody perennial-based mixed species production systems, has the potential to arrest land degradation and improve site productivity through interactions among trees, soil, crops, and livestock, and thus restore part, if not all, of the degraded lands Many such practices are sited on the smallholdings of tropical Asia, characterised by sub-optimal management and subsistence farming conditions Food production either directly (producing food grains, root crops, fruits, and vegetables) or indirectly (improving soil conditions and thereby promoting understorey crop productivity especially on degraded sites) constitutes the central theme of most smallholder agroforestry practices Low input use and ecological security are other intrinsic attributes of this unique land use activity Despite such advantages, agroforestry as a land use option has not attracted much attention from the planners and extension community Reasons for this include inconsistencies in understorey crop productivity (positive, negative, or neutral effects depending on species, site, and management) and lack of public policy support Conscious efforts on system management and policy adjustments are therefore imperative to promote agroforestry adoption by the farming community

Small-Scale, Nature-Based Tourism as a Pro-Poor Development Intervention: Two Examples in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Abstract: Tourism is widely acknowledged as a key economic sector that has the potential to contribute to national and local development and, more specifically, serve as a mechanism to promote poverty alleviation and pro-poor development within a particular locality. In countries of the global South, nature-based tourism initiatives can make a meaningful impact on the livelihoods of the poor, in particular the subsistence based rural poor. Taking two examples in KwaZulu-Natal Province, South Africa, where small-scale tourism initiatives were developed recently in response to existing natural attractions in the context of coping with local economic crises, this paper broadly assesses the modest benefits to date, as well as drawbacks, in improving conditions of life.

Wildlife in the life of local people of the semi-arid Argentine Chaco

Abstract: The semi-arid Argentine Chaco is inhabited by mestizo people, who live on an economy of subsistence based on the use of natural resources and livestock ranching. I investigated the dietary and economic importance of wildlife for local people. Through interviews and participant observation, I found that wildlife is used primarily as food, providing about a third of the total meat consumed by local peasants. Local people use at least 26 species of wildlife although they concentrate on few species. Small species, Chacoan cavies and armadillos, are consumed most, representing 48% of the total wild meat consumed. Consumption of wild meat follows seasonal patterns determined by hunting methods, preferences for meat quality and species activity patterns. The consumptive value of wild meat is high in comparison with wages, but lower in comparison with forest exploitation. Illegal commercialization of wildlife is practiced mainly by villagers and by outsiders and it affects endangered species. Patterns of use of wildlife by local people differ from other Latin American groups in terms of the range of species hunted and the role that hunting plays in local people’ livelihoods. The first steps towards conservation of this increasingly threatened region should involve decreasing hunting by local people of the more vulnerable species and controlling all illegal commercial hunting.

Implications of Livelihood Dependence on Non-Timber Products in Peruvian Amazonia

Abstract: The present and future well-being of the world's forest dwelling populations depends on their ability to gain livelihood resources from their immediate environment. Sustainable extraction of non-timber forest products has been promoted by conservationists and development agencies as a feasible strategy for forest dwellers that does not compromise the resource base. Yet surveys of actual resource use suggest that for poorer resource-dependent communities without access to markets, non-timber forest products can only ever represent a safety-net activity and a supplementary income source. Others argue that resource availability, in terms of the diversity and productivity of the forest, is the key parameter in realizing a contribution of forest products to well-being. This paper examines the scope and heterogeneity of forest product use to reveal whether resource availability necessarily provides the context for significant contributions to well-being of forest dwellers. We present data from an area of tropical rainforest, close to Iquitos in Peru, which was previously shown to have high potential value. We find, through a census survey of households within a forest reserve area, that non-timber forest products provide only a relatively small portion of income and that only a small proportion of available products are actually commercialized, despite apparent market availability. We show that the low rates of commercialization can be explained by unequal access capital assets used for extraction, to natural resources themselves, and to product markets. They are also explained by the concentration of capital-poor households on subsistence gathering activities. The value of destructive uses of forests, both logging and agriculture, remain higher than returns from non-timber products. This research demonstrates that although non-timber forest products are an important livelihood source, market integration and commercialization is not everywhere an appropriate or realistic strategy.

The Contribution of Subsistence Foods to the Total Diet of Alaska Natives in 13 Rural Communities

Abstract: The goal of this study was to describe the use of subsistence and purchased foods by residents of rural Alaska villages. Interviewers administered food frequency questionnaires referring to the previous 12 months to 665 participants between the ages of 13 and 88 years in 13 villages in three ecological zones of Alaska. Participants reported consuming a wide variety of subsistence foods, in some cases in large quantities, including salmon, other fish, moose, caribou, and a wide variety of plant foods. Subsistence foods were dense in protein, iron, vitamin A, vitamin B12, and omega-3 fatty acids. Participants also reported consuming purchased staples and sugared beverages.