Indigenous Land Use in the Ecuadorian Amazon: A Cross-cultural and Multilevel Analysis

Among the remaining tropical forests of lowland Latin America, many are inhabited by indigenous peoples, and the sustainability of their land uses is a point of heated debate in the conservation community. Numerous small-scale studies have documented changes in indigenous land use in individual communities in the context of expanding frontier settlements and markets, but few studies have included larger populations or multiple ethnic groups. In this paper we use data from a regional-scale survey of five indigenous populations in the Northern Ecuadorian Amazon to describe their agricultural land use practices and investigate the factors that affect those practices. We find the areas cultivated by indigenous households to be small compared to those of nearby mestizo colonists, but a large proportion of indigenous cultivated area is in commercial land uses. We also construct multilevel statistical models to investigate the household and community-level factors that affect indigenous land use. The results reveal significant influences on cultivated area from contextual factors such as access to markets, oil company activities, and the land tenure regime, as well as from household characteristics such as demographic composition, participation in alternative livelihood activities, and human, social and physical capitals. Overall the results are most consistent with market integration as an underlying driver of land use change in indigenous territories of the study area.

International Labor Migration from a Tropical Development Frontier: Globalizing Households and an Incipient Forest Transition

This study documents labor migration and its impacts on household income, material well-being, and land-use practices in Mexico’s southern Yucatán and examines the relation of labor migration to local forest recovery. Drawing on a 203-household survey in 14 communities, we contrast migrating and non-migrating households, showing that migration earnings substitute for agricultural earnings and that migrating households cultivate significantly less farmland. A larger percentage of migrating households maintain pasture, but, on average, not more hectares. These dynamics are consistent with the decline in deforestation registered in the area for the year 2000. Incipient local forest recovery is considered in light of current forest transition theory, with an examination of three hypothesized paths to forest recovery: economic development, forest scarcity, and smallholder agricultural adjustment. The southern Yucatán case illustrates the need to explicitly incorporate the role of globalizing household economies into forest transition theory.

Resource Entitlement and Mobility of Pastoralists in the Yerer and Daketa Valleys,Eastern Ethiopia

Literature on the mobility of pastoralists and resource access is widely available, but conceptualization and understanding of the socioeconomic processes expected to affect the outcome are inconsistent. In this article, drawing on research conducted in the Yerer and Daketa Valleys, eastern Ethiopia, we use the notion of entitlements to examine how, under increasing pressure for resource access, various agro-pastoral households manage conflicting interests in common grazing resources. We observed that in times of drought and resource scarcity incumbent agro-pastoralists find peaceful sharing arrangements with intruding pastoralists. Asset-poor agro-pastoralists enter into mutually beneficial arrangements with pastoralists, trading their resource endowments to grazing land for other assets from the pastoralists, whereas wealthier households prefer a reciprocal risk-management strategy. These multiple arrangements have distributional effects because asset-poor agro-pastoralist households can stabilize or enhance their household assets and their capabilities in times of drought, and thus benefit from assisting pastoralist migrants to the common grazing land.

Does Tenure Matter? A Comparative Analysis of Agricultural Expansion in the Mosquitia Forest Corridor

This article compares how public protection of forests and common-property forest institutions serve to control outside encroachment into frontier forests in Honduras and Nicaragua. The article combines institutional analysis with ethnographically based fieldwork and analysis of land-cover images to evaluate how property-rights arrangements influence monitoring, enforcement, and compliance with rules to restrict agricultural expansion in two biosphere reserves in the Mosquitia Corridor. Findings show that territorial demarcation and common-property rights are important components for frontier forest conservation. In areas with weak enforcement mechanisms and heavy reliance on social norms over official regulatory measures, the findings suggest that the perceived legitimacy of tenure arrangements and their respective land-use rules are fundamental to controlling the agricultural frontier.

Home Garden Production and Energetic Sustainability in Calakmul,Campeche, Mexico

Energy flows were studied for the 2002–2003 agricultural cycle in four households for which agriculture is part of a diversified survival strategy and four that practice agriculture as a business. Home garden inputs and outputs were measured monthly. Quantified inputs were: household labour, household agro-system production, and purchased external renewable and non-renewable energy. Outputs measured were: sales, family and animal foods. While both strategies had similar indicators in biomass and energy production, vegetable richness, and soil quality, household garden function and sustainability differed between subsistence and commercial householders. Subsistence gardens complemented family diet and contributed to household system resiliency. They relied heavily on renewable energy sources from within their agro-system. Gardens in commercial households reduced fruit tree area and increased animal husbandry for the market. They depended more on purchased non-renewable energy sources and were less sustainable and much less energy efficient than traditional gardens.

Beyond Population and Environment: Household Demographic Life Cycles and Land Use Allocation Among Small Farms in the Amazon

Most research featuring demographic factors in environmental change has focused on processes operating at the level of national or global populations. This paper focuses on household-level demographic life cycles among colonists in the Amazon, and evaluates the impacts on land use allocation. The analysis goes beyond prior research by including a broader suite of demographic variables, and by simultaneously assessing their impacts on multiple land uses with different economic and ecological implications. We estimate a system of structural equations that accounts for endogeneity among land uses, and the findings indicate stronger demographic effects than previous work. These findings bear implications for modeling land use, and the place of demography in environmental research.

Change and Continuity in a Pastoralist Community in the High Peruvian Andes

Pastoralists of the high Andes Mountains raise mixed herds of camelids and sheep. This study evaluates the land use of herdsmen who are confronted by both socioeconomic and climate changes in Huancavelica, central Peru. Land use/ land cover change (LULCC) was measured through satellite imagery, and pastoralists’ capacity to adapt to socioenvironmental changes was evaluated through interviews and archival research. The most dynamic LULCCs between 1990 and 2000 were large increases in wetlands and a loss of permanent ice. We conclude that the people’s responses to these changes will depend on availability of institutions to manage pastures, other household resources, and perceptions of these biophysical changes. Socioenvironmental change is not new in the study area, but current shifts will likely force this community to alter its rules of access to pastures, its economic rationales in regards to commodities produced, and the degree of dependence on seasonal wage labor. In this scenario, households with a greater amount of livestock will fare better in terms of assets and capital that will allow them to benefit from the increasing presence of a market economy in a landscape undergoing climate change.

Toward an Integrated Understanding of Pesticide Use Intensity in Costa Rican Vegetable Farming

Understanding the factors that influence the adoption of synthetic pesticides has to date overshadowed explanations of variation in pesticide intensity. I conducted a survey of vegetable farmers in Northern Cartago and the Ujarrás Valley, Costa Rica, in 2003–2004 with the goal of explaining differences in pesticide intensity with reference to socioeconomic, political economic, and agroecological characteristics and relationships. Using ordinary least squares regression models, this paper explores the factors that influence pesticide use intensity in potato and squash production. Results indicate that many variables strongly influence pesticide intensity, including variables related to the farmer, farm household, political-economic relationships, the biophysical environment, and agroecological relationships. Conclusions discuss the need for an integrated approach to adequately understand pesticide intensity and potential policy interventions including agroecological education and extension, increased enforcement of pesticide residue limits in the national market, and land reform to allow for longer fallow periods.

Agriculture and Inequality in the Colonial Andes: A Simulation of Production and Consumption Using Administrative Documents

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, indigenous communities in the Viceroyalty of Peru suffered forced resettlement, introduced disease, and onerous colonial tribute levies. These produced an onslaught of petitions for new tribute counts, as their diminished populations were obliged to pay the head taxes set by earlier censuses. The resulting visitas (administrative surveys) provide a wealth of information on the demography and agricultural systems of colonial Andean communities. However, comparatively little quantitative research exists on the distribution of agricultural resources and the nutritional demands of households. We model agricultural production and nutritional demand using household demographic and landholding declarations in the visitas from the Colca Valley of southern highland Peru, combined with ethnographically-derived estimates of agricultural production and nutritional demand. The results indicate that despite surplus agricultural production in the aggregate, there were significant differences in intra- and inter-community land wealth and production sufficiency ratios, leaving about 30% of households with caloric shortfalls. In contrast to regional-scale carrying capacity-type models, this simulation characterizes agricultural inequality within colonial Andean communities, and thus accounts for the hardship evidenced by tributary recount petitions, even in a breadbasket province from which much surplus production was extracted to fill colonial coffers.

Will Agroforests Vanish? The Case of Damar Agroforests in Indonesia

Resin producing agroforestry in the Krui area of Sumatra in Indonesia is presented as an environmentally friendly, income generating land-use system which contributes to both development and conservation objectives. We studied the change in household income portfolios in three communities in the Krui area. The studies revealed that in the period 1995–2004 agroforestry remained the main source of income. We predict, however, that due to declining resin productivity per hectare, and rising price and demand for timber, an increasing number of farmers will cut their mature agroforests in the near future. At the same time our data suggests that farmers will continue tree planting activities. In result old agroforests may vanish while new ones will be established.

Report: access to land at the northern periphery of Niokolo-Koba National Park, Senegal

Based on research conducted in Senegal in 2004, this field report focuses on the politics of access to land at the northern periphery of the Niokolo-Koba National Park, where a group of villages evicted from the national park were resettled in the 1970s. Conflicts over the allocation of land resurfaced in the 1980s, following the application of laws authorizing rural community councils to allocate use rights in village agricultural lands. The land claims of evicted villages were challenged by the rural council and local state authorities, who sought to define such claims as illegal or ambiguous based on exclusionary discourses of productive use of land, autochthony and citizenship. The politics of access to land at the northern periphery are shaped by land and administrative reforms undertaken since the end of colonial rule in Senegal and the on-going local transformation of authority and property relations under increasing commoditization and insecurity of land use rights.

Comparing Inductive and Deductive Modeling of Land Use Decisions: Principles,a Model and an Illustration from the Philippines

Understanding the causes of land use change is of great importance for issues of tropical deforestation, agricultural development and biodiversity conservation. Many quantitative studies, therefore, aim to link land use change to its causal ‘driving forces.’ The epistemology of virtually all these studies is inductive, searching for correlations within relatively large, sometimes spatially explicit, datasets. This can be sound science but we here aim to exemplify that there is also scope for more deductive approaches that test a pre-defined explanatory theory. The paper first introduces the principles and merits of inductive and more deductive types of land use modeling. It then presents one integrated causal model that is subsequently specified to predict land use in an area in northeastern Philippines in a deductive manner, and tested against the observed land use in that area. The same set of land use data is also used in an inductive (multinomial regression) approach. With a goodness-of-prediction of 70% of the deductive model and a goodness-of-fit of 77% of the inductive model, both perform equally well, statistically. Because the deductive model explicitly contains not only the causal factors but also the causal mechanisms that explain land use, the deductive model then provides a more truly causal, as well as more theory-connected, understanding of land use. This provides land use scholarship with an invitation to add more deductive (theory-driven and theory-building) daring to its methodological repertoire.

Smallholders and the ‘Household Responsibility System’: Adapting to Institutional Change in Chinese Agriculture

During the last quarter century, China’s agricultural sector has undergone a dramatic transformation from collective to private production under the so-called “Household Responsibility System.” This incentive system, designed to increase yields, reallocated communal land to peasant households, creating hundreds of millions of smallholders with relative autonomy over land use decisions and crop selection. Based on recent ethnographic research, this paper discusses the smallholder farming system of a mixed-ethnic community that intensively cultivates small land plots for subsistence and market exchange in China’s populous southwestern province of Sichuan. The paper characterizes the smallholder system in terms of biodiversity of plant and animal species, market distribution of crops, multiple cropping systems, and labor and technology inputs. The paper also describes how smallholders adapt their agricultural practices and decisions to changing market conditions and agricultural policies. Significantly, these adaptive strategies focus on shifting to the production of various cash crops, including melons and mangoes. Implications for the long-term viability of China’s smallholders, particularly in ecologically and economically marginal areas, are also discussed.

Does Off-Farm Work Discourage Soil Conservation? Incentives and Disincentives Throughout Two Honduran Hillside Communities

   Soil conservation is widely regarded a critical component of sustainable livelihood strategies for the hillsides of Honduras. However, neoliberal polices have reduced economic incentives for agricultural intensification. Recent studies indicate off-farm work opportunities address poverty in a way conservation and development efforts do not. Yet off-farm work may discourage poor farmers from practicing soil conservation. A middle ground is needed. This study indicates micro-credit can substitute for off-farm work and encourage soil conservation practice. Many regions throughout Honduras have had extensive contact with soil conservation programs and would benefit more from credit services than redundant technological extension.

Plantation forests and biodiversity: oxymoron or opportunity?

Losses of natural and semi-natural forests, mostly to agriculture, are a significant concern for biodiversity. Against this trend, the area of intensively managed plantation forests increases, and there is much debate about the implications for biodiversity. We provide a comprehensive review of the function of plantation forests as habitat compared with other land cover, examine the effects on biodiversity at the landscape scale, and synthesise context-specific effects of plantation forestry on biodiversity. Natural forests are usually more suitable as habitat for a wider range of native forest species than plantation forests but there is abundant evidence that plantation forests can provide valuable habitat, even for some threatened and endangered species, and may contribute to the conservation of biodiversity by various mechanisms. In landscapes where forest is the natural land cover, plantation forests may represent a low-contrast matrix, and afforestation of agricultural land can assist conservation by providing complementary forest habitat, buffering edge effects, and increasing connectivity. In contrast, conversion of natural forests and afforestation of natural non-forest land is detrimental. However, regional deforestation pressure for agricultural development may render plantation forestry a ‘lesser evil’ if forest managers protect indigenous vegetation remnants. We provide numerous context-specific examples and case studies to assist impact assessments of plantation forestry, and we offer a range of management recommendations. This paper also serves as an introduction and background paper to this special issue on the effects of plantation forests on biodiversity.

Leitlinien zur molekulargenetischen Diagnostik: Fragiles-X und Fragiles-X assoziiertes Tremor/Ataxie Syndrom

Ohne Zusammenfassung

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Individual variability of behavioural responses by Wandering Albatrosses (Diomedea exulans) to human disturbance

Sub-Antarctic Marion Island has had a permanent research station for 50 years and the islands Wandering Albatrosses have been intensively studied for 20 years. The reactions of breeding birds to approaches by a human on foot were recorded. Three response variables were calculated: intensity of vocal reaction (IVR), intensity of non-vocal reaction (INR) and overall response index (ORI). At 5 m from the nest, twice as many birds stood and/or vocalised as at 15 m. Nearest neighbour distance, age and gender did not explain individual variability of responses. Study colony birds had higher IVR scores than non-study colony birds; birds at colonies closest to the station had the highest ORI scores. A better breeding record was associated with lower IVR and ORI scores, but a causative relationship remains to be demonstrated. A minimum viewing distance of 25 m is recommended for breeding Wandering Albatrosses.

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“Eating Hay”: The Ecology,Economy and Culture of Viliui Sakha Smallholders of Northeastern Siberia

Contemporary rural Viliui Sakha of northeastern Siberia, Russia, are a Turkicspeaking people practicing horse and cattle breeding in the subarctic. This article details their story of survival in the north as one not only of adapting a southern subsistence to an extreme climate but also to the effects of Russian colonization, Soviet collectivization, and post-Soviet decentralization. In the post-Soviet period a majority of rural Viliu Sakha adapted to the loss of a centralized agro-industrial state farm system by developing a smallholder food production system relying on cattle husbandry supplemented with other subsistence sources including fish, game, forage, other domesticates, and garden products. In the twenty-first century, this “cows-and-kin” system represents a resilient smallholder adaptation based on reviving pre-Soviet production knowledge, recalling ecological knowledge, and relying on kin. The article concludes with a discussion of the future of cows-and-kin by exploring issues of alienated youth, accessing land and the overwhelming concern of inhabitants about the local effects of global climate change.

Hennigian Phylogenetic Systematics and the ‘Groundplan’ vs. ‘Post-Groundplan’ Approaches: A Reply to Kukalová-Peck

The recent contribution by Jarmila Kukalová-Peck on Hennigian phylogenetics and hexapod limb evolution is critically evaluated.