As a doctoral student in applied ecological anthropology, I am particularly interested in the human-nature interface in areas of recent deforestation and plan to analyze policies that have been implemented to reforest areas, prevent further deforestation, or otherwise promote sustainable forestry practices. I want to evaluate the efficacy of such policies in ecological terms as well as social terms, which will require a variety of methodological approaches, including ecological monitoring, economic evaluation, and dialogue among the locals managing the land and the officers of larger municipal, provincial, and national systems, as well as Western ecologists. Toward this goal, I am interested in communal forest systems, in which local inhabitants are part of the bottom up policymaking process regarding the use of timber and non-timber forest resources. Specifically, I would like to evaluate ongoing multiple-use agroforestry programs in tropical areas, especially in Southeast Asia.
Agroforestry involves the creation of buffer zones of forested areas surrounding fields of agricultural crops. It seeks to gradually restore the natural complexity found in forests that have been destroyed by large-scale agriculture, especially through monocropping, while at the same time benefiting the human inhabitants of the land by providing “wild” resources for hunting, trapping, fishing, and gathering of foods, medicines, and materials. Agroforests include edible and medicinal species within the fields of the main cash crop and also on the edges of them. Multi-layer canopies, migration corridors and patches of safe haven for animal species are created or kept in this system.
Agroforests have been created in tropical areas of Southeast Asia specifically for the purpose of growing rubber, spices, fruit, and timber, and they have stemmed from traditional forest management practices of indigenous peoples and from the need to decentralize faltering government economies. Traditional swidden agriculturalists have been blamed for much of the deforestation in Southeast Asia, but swiddeners have been also recently been instrumental in incorporating agroforestry practices into new resource management plans.
The allowance for responsible logging in agroforests is a hot topic now. Some fear that the agroforests will be clearcut if policies allow logging, while others see it as a necessary financial incentive for individual farmers and communities to integrate agroforestry with their cash crops. We anthropologists must not assume that indigenous people will always make the best long-term ecological decisions about their resources. But we must also act as cultural translators and explain why programs that worked in one dynamic social context did not or could not work in another. Humans cannot be excluded from the ecological landscape, and any conservation policy that ignores their impact or assumes that top down impositions alone can solve environmental problems is doomed to failure.
In many parts of the world, there have been problems enacting and enforcing effective conservation and responsible agricultural and sustainable forestry laws. One “blanket” policy that has been suggested to deal with this problem is a decentralization of the government and the subsequent replacement of national policies with local policies, such as agroforestry, that come from within a community that has traditionally cared for a piece of land. The historical approach to case studies is important as a pedagogical device, and several case studies regarding forest policy, and agroforestry in particular, have been cited often as landmark cases which have determined future policies. It is vital to understand, for example, the reason for the fall of many of Indonesia’s agroforests due to the lack of acknowledgement by state agencies and private companies of traditional land tenure rights. Each case must be taken individually to determine if community based agroforestry is the best option at the present time, or if more state regulation of forest lands is needed to ensure the protection of resources and satisfaction of the needs of the people. Incorporating the voices of indigenous people in the management of their own lands is a complicated and ongoing process, and often times, there are much larger issues that must be dealt with first or simultaneously, such as extreme poverty in developing nations.
The anthropological perspective is vital to the successful implementation of bottom up communal forest resource policies. Much work has been done on issues regarding communal ownership of land and policies regarding decentralization of central governments regarding the management of natural resources. Recently, works by Gibson, McKean, Ostrom, Poffenberger, and others have analyzed modern cases of communal land issues and traditional forest property rights.
I see the policy of community based forestry not as a panacea, but as a set of tools that can greatly benefit money-strapped governments, impoverished and marginalized indigenes around the world, and conservationists with the interests of long-term ecological sustainability at heart. How this plays out on a global scale has yet to be seen.
