ANALYSISLand use intensification potential in slash-and-burn farming through improvements in technical efficiency
Introduction
A commonly voiced policy prescription to promote agricultural growth while discouraging small scale farmers from expanding cultivation into ecologically fragile lands is the adoption of ‘productivity increasing’ green revolution-type technologies. However, recent evidence suggests that farmers' adoption of such technologies can provide further incentives to expand agricultural land into forest margins due to the increase in farming profitability (Angelsen and Kaimowitz, 2000, Foster and Rosenzweig, 2003). As a result, an increasing effort is being directed to design technologies that can both protect the environment and boost output, what is known as the ‘double green revolution’ (Conway, 2000).
Yet, the widespread diffusion through farmers' adoption of such ‘evergreen’ practices is complicated, as technological adoption by farmers largely depends on the coevolution of the farming population, the land resources, and the wider institutional, economic, and techno-political context (Perrin and Winkelmann, 1976, Bellon and Taylor, 1993). Additionally, the relatively high setup costs of these technologies (in terms of the labour investment) preclude their adoption by poorer farmers (Ramírez and Shultz, 2000).
Given this backdrop, the present paper explores an alternative approach towards simultaneously conserving land and maintaining production levels through land use intensification. The particular idea of intensification conveyed here reflects the process that allows the reduction in the use of inputs (including land acreage) without negatively affecting output levels. Furthermore, the approach departs from ideas of technological innovation or adoption. Instead, it focuses on assessing the scope of improving farmers' ability to apply their given set of inputs under the same farming technology. This notion is examined in the context of a traditional slash-and-burn (SaB) farming or forest–fallow-based shifting cultivation system as typically practised in the tropics.
Slash-and-burn (SaB) farming is based on the production of crops that are alternated with periods of vegetation fallow. It consists of clearing patches of forest by cutting down the tree-bush vegetation and burning the woody biomass. This adds an additional reserve of plant nutrients to the soil through the ashes and helps clear the land of weeds. The nutrients accumulated in the topsoil and in the vegetation itself during fallow represent a capital gain for farmers (Nye and Greenland, 1960). Following a few years of cultivation, the plot is left in fallow, the forest is allowed to return, after which the forest fallow is cut again, and the cycle recommences.
Due to the complexity of the functioning of SaB, simplistic views have tended to associate it with a waste of economic resources, and its cultivators as being backward and isolated.1 Furthermore, besides concerns about deforestation, it is also claimed that SaB is responsible for significant greenhouse gas emissions (Sánchez, 2000). It is therefore not surprising that negative views about SaB abound in the rural development and environmental policy arena and for alternative land-use options to be actively sought.2 Nevertheless, as Dove (1983) eloquently argues, some of these simplistic views are “part of the myth of a dual economy which has been used since colonial times to justify the exploitation of a very rational, productive, and entrepreneurial but politically vulnerable peasantry, by an often less rational, less productive, but more powerful urban and governing elite” (pp. 96). In addition, it has also been suggested that SaB may be more efficient in energy terms than most modern agricultural systems (Pimentel and Pimentel, 1979).
Land-use intensification in SaB can occur in two main ways that may not be exclusive. One way is through farmers' adoption of new technologies to reduce the need for further burning by reducing the fallow–cultivation cycle towards more continuous cropping. The idea is to relax environmental limits in SaB by applying modern agroecological principles (Sánchez, 1999).3 However, for this ‘evergreen revolution’ to be successful, farmers' asset heterogeneity, institutions, and objectives need to be considered (Tomich et al., 1998). For instance, ill-defined land tenureship in SaB systems can limit the range of viable cropping practices (Schuck et al., 2002). In addition, the choice of the length of time that the forest is left in fallow is influenced by farmers' access to labour (Coomes et al., 2000).
An alternative to land use intensification through technological adoption is based on improvements in productive (technical) efficiency under the actual (or traditional) SaB practices. The idea is to maintain crop output levels by reducing inputs levels, including the amount of forestland cleared for cultivation. Furthermore, by improving productive efficiency, labour can also be freed from crop production and used in alternative activities.4
The notion of productive inefficiency is central to the analysis of this paper. Here it refers to the failure to apply the most productive ‘technique’ in terms of using current inputs, among all those techniques that could be used by farmers, given the current ‘technology’ (Torkamani and Hardaker, 1996). Hence, efficiency is defined in a technical sense. Moreover, while what is being evaluated is actual productivity relative to potential productivity, this does not imply irrationality on the part of farmers who are technically inefficient. Instead, efficiency is assumed to be influenced by nonphysical factors such as farming experience, skill, and information, which in turn are likely to be determined by other factors such as fixed assets, property rights, land tenancy, and nonmonetary objectives (Llewelyn and Williams, 1996).
The primary objective of this paper is to assess the potential for land use intensification in traditional slash-and-burn in the context of improving technical efficiency where land acreage is a basic input. The analysis is case study based. The ecological and economic data used in the empirical analysis comes from a traditional shifting cultivation community of Yucatan (Mexico), where due to the agroecological and economic constraints, a Boserupian style of land use intensification is very limited. The data from the study area are used to estimate levels of households' technical efficiency levels in farming and to identify their determinants. With regard to the factors affecting efficiency, especial attention is paid to address the effect of household members' on- and off-farm labour diversification decisions.
In addition, the directional link between efficiency and soil fertility is empirically addressed. On the one hand, it is expected that higher soil fertility would increase efficiency by relaxing a key agroecological constraint. On the other hand, farmers may try to overcome the problem of cropping in less fertile soils by using available inputs more efficiently. This bidirectional link has been largely unexplored in the empirical literature, despite Farrell's claim that “it is never possible to decide precisely how far the fertility of a particular farmer's land is due to nature and how far to good husbandry” (Farrell, 1957, pp. 260).
The paper unfolds as follows: The following section lays out the methodology of the empirical analysis. After a description of the case study and the data collection in Section 3, efficiency estimations and interpretations are presented in Section 4. Then, the determinants of inefficiency levels in shifting cultivation are identified and discussed in Section 5, and the final section of the paper concludes.
Section snippets
The theoretical framework
A vector of crop outputs z=(z1,. …, zM) is often achieved in traditional slash-and-burn farming by applying a vector of inputs, x=(x1, …, xN), where z1, can be assumed to be a major crop intercropped with other M−1 minor crops. Regarding input use, and given the negligible use of artificial inputs, household i can be assumed to allocate the vector of inputs xi=(ai, li, si), in farming, where, a stands for the area of forestland cleared for cultivation, l corresponds to the labour applied
Description of data and study area
The data used in the empirical analysis were obtained through household and agronomic surveys from the municipality of Hocaba, in the henequen (sisal) zone of Yucatan, Mexico, between 1998 and 1999. In 1998, there were approximately 1035 households living in the municipality, 60% of which were actively engaged in shifting cultivation, the primary farming method in the region. The data corresponds to 74 households (12% of all shifting cultivating households) randomly selected from a complete
SFP results
When farm households operate at some level of technical inefficiency, estimating a standard mean–response production function produces biased results. The alternative is to estimate model (3a). In addition, the determinants of inefficiency can be determined by estimating (3a), (3b) simultaneously (Battese and Coelli, 1995). Moreover, the effects of inputs, such as soil fertility, on inefficiency levels can be estimated using a variant of a nonneutral SFP model (Huang and Liu, 1994, Battese and
Determinants of technical inefficiency
The results of the previous analysis suggests that soil fertility affects technical efficiency in the study area. Here the potential effects on efficiency of households' socioeconomic and demographic factors, as well as farm characteristics, are identified.
The relationship between households' off-farm labour decisions and efficiency in low-input farming systems has not received much attention in the literature. Notable exceptions include the studies by Wang et al. (1996) in China, and Abdulai
Concluding remarks
Increased attention is being paid to find land use intensification technologies to reduce the burning of forest plots under slash-and-burn farming. Departing from Green Revolution-type of productivity enhancing technologies to discourage further forest burning, new ‘evergreen’ options are continuously being proposed based on the adoption and diffusion of modern agroecological principles. It has been argued here that another, not necessarily exclusive way to intensify land use under traditional
Acknowledgements
Thanks are owed to the team of PROTROPICO from the Universidad Autonóma de Yucatán, especially Juan Jiménez Osornio, Francisco Bautista, and Germán Zarate, for helping with laboratory and fieldwork intricacies. This paper has also benefited from comments and suggestions by Charles Perrings and Edward Barbies and two anonymous referees. A research grant (AK-BFI96.113) from the Basque Government is also kindly acknowledged. The author alone is responsible for remaining errors.
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