340 Agricultural Revolutions and Change
and accounted for about 70 per cent of the deforestation in Africa, 50 per cent in
Asia, and 30 per cent in Latin America. Although the predominant role played by
small-scale farmers has come into question (Geist and Lambin, 2002), they are
often part of the deforestation process.
Small-scale farmers practising slash-and-burn agriculture clear forests to pro-
duce food and make a living for their families. They often have few options other
than to continue clearing tropical forests because of the benefits and profits derived
from deforestation. In many cases, these farmers are marginalized from society and
government support programmes, and often they are migrants escaping from pov-
erty and inequities elsewhere in the country. Any efforts to arrest deforestation
must consider this group; in the absence of alternatives they will continue to clear
forest to meet their needs for food and income.
Early approaches to conserve tropical forests were done at the exclusion of
small-scale farmers that depend on the forest for their livelihoods (FAO Staff,
1957). These ‘fence off the forest’ approaches often increased conflicts between
conservation and development efforts and ignored the causes of deforestation. The
importance of agricultural development for reducing the poverty of the small-scale
farmers and the economic development of developing countries is increasingly
recognized. Therefore the development and promotion of agricultural systems that
reduce poverty must be integrated with strategies to conserve tropical forests and
the biodiversity and carbon they house (McNeely and Scherr, 2003). The chal-
lenges are to identify alternative systems that meet farmers’ needs and that can
reduce pressure to clear more forest or minimize the impacts on biodiversity and
other global environmental resources. The Alternatives to Slash and Burn (ASB)
consortium was created to address this challenge.
This chapter introduces the ASB Programme, an international consortium of
researchers and extension groups that was established specifically to investigate the
causes and consequences of deforestation by small-scale farmers and to identify
land-use systems that enhance both local livelihoods and the environment and the
policies and other changes needed to support them. It begins with a description
and distinction of shifting cultivation and slash-and-burn practices and continues
with a summary of land-use intensification pathways in the tropics. This is fol-
lowed by the objectives, benchmark site locations, broad methods and activities of
the ASB consortium.
Land Use at the Tropical Forest Margins
Almost all tropical forests are cleared by similar methods that start with slashing
the forest with chainsaws, axes and machetes and burning the felled vegetation after
it has dried. In this sense, slash-and-burn is simply a land-clearing technique. The
subsequent land-use pathway that follows land clearing differs depending on the dif-
ferent groups of people involved – indigenous forest dwellers, small-scale farmers
and large-scale private operators – and the intended use of the land, including the