Conversion of tropical moist forests Author:Norman Myers Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 3 Role of Forest Farmers in Conversion of Tropical Moist Forests By far the most important factor in conversion of tropical moist forests (tmf) appears to... more » be the forest farmer. Of the various forms of forestland agriculture, the main ones are shifting cultivation of traditional style, smallholder agriculture of more recent style, and sundry types of squatter colonization. Shifting cultivation can likewise be categorized into variations in accord with local environmental factors in each of the three main Tmf regions. A characteristic common to all forms of forest farming is that the farmer clears a patch of forest of virtually all its trees, and then usually burns the wood (locally the larger logs may be sold). Hence a generic term for forest farming could be slash-and-burn cultivation—a term that is frequently though erroneously used in the limited sense of shifting cultivation. Forest farming has been an established practice in Tmf for millennia, almost entirely in the form of shifting cultivation as popularly understood. Indeed, shifting cultivation can be characterized as one of the major agricultural systems of the world. Widespread though it has been, shifting cultivation has not generally resulted in long-term elimination of forests. For example, Southeast Asia has featured shifting cultivation for at least 2,000 years, which indicates that the system is an essentially sound mode of utilizing forest environments within traditional patterns. Farmers would follow a locally migratory way of life by virtue of rotational agriculture: felling and burning a patch of forest, raising crops for 2 or 3 years until the soil lost itsfertility or until weeds encroached, then moving on to repeat the process in another patch of forest, eventually returning to the original locat...« less