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Creating Cultural Diversity:
Tropical Forests Transformed

Olga F. Linares
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Apartado 2072, Balboa, Ancón, Rep. de Panamá

Today, there is “an increasing realization that cultural [diversity] and biological diversity are intimately and inextricably linked” (McNeely and others 1995:767). The enormous variety that underlies the structures, beliefs, knowledge, and cultural practices of peoples around the world is a unique and valuable reservoir of environmental knowledge and know-how. During millennia of careful observation and experimentation, human groups have developed different uses for the plants and animals that make up the diverse ecosystems of the world. Distinct cultural patterns have emerged, have become specialized, and ultimately have changed in response to coevolution, coexistence, and mutual transformation along a nature-culture continuum. These cultural lifeways are increasingly threatened, as are the biological systems that support them.

This essay explores the many ways in which indigenous peoples relate to each other and to components of the ecosystems in which they play an essential role.1

1 Indigenous peoples are members or communities that to a large extent follow their own cultural rules and their own social and economic practices and often also elect their own local leaders. Indigenous has been applied mainly to small-scale societies and often to New World (Amerindian) groups. The term seems to me less apt when applied, for example, to such rural farmers of Africa and Malaysia as the Ibo shifting cultivators of Nigeria or the Batak agroforesters of north Sumatra. Both those peoples are numerous and form part of large, semiautonomous political entities (they form nations within modern states). Moreover, indigenous is inapplicable to temporary or permanent migrants. Because other alternatives, such as native and tribal are even more inappropriate, I will be using the term indigenous here to refer in general to relatively autonomous tropical peoples. When possible, either the name by which certain groups are known in the literature or, even better, the name that the people themselves use (their selfdefinitional label) should be used.

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Small-scale communities differ within themselves and between each other along several dimensions—linguistic, ideological, social, and political—and in subsistence pursuits and modes of insertion into the modern global economy. I emphasize two interrelated aspects: human ecological and economic behavior, especially with respect to physical resources, and cultural constructs, which are the beliefs and attitudes that people have toward their natural surroundings. A truism worth repeating is that the mental and material systems humans have devised to survive and reproduce are, simultaneously, responses to the environment and ways of shaping its biological diversity for human use. Thus, scholars justifiably argue that nature and culture are indivisible and that the real subject matter of human ecology should be the analysis of socionatural systems (Bennett 1996). Doubtless, they are correct; all human existence presupposes a degree of ecological involvement. To facilitate making empirical generalizations and forging comparisons, I will focus this discussion on tropical areas of the New World, Africa, and Asia. These regions have particularly high rates of biological diversity and are inhabited by diverse rural peoples who have devised highly specialized and lowenergy, as well as high-energy, adaptations to multiple resources.

The Tropics: Biological Diversity

Tropical forests are among the most complex and diverse of terrestrial ecosystems, having the greatest number of dynamically interacting plant and animal species (Whitmore 1992). High temperatures, abundant rainfall, and fragile soils are their general characteristics, but tropical forests differ greatly from one another in terms of their composition, dynamics, and size. Commonly, a distinction is made between climax or mature rain forests that have ever-wet environments and monsoon or seasonal secondary forests that have a marked dry period, but this is an oversimplification. In reality, all tropical forests are dynamic, subject to constant processes of natural disturbance caused by a series of biotic factors (such as insects and vertebrates), abiotic factors (for example, tree falls, landslides, storms, and droughts), and anthropogenic disturbances (usually repeated and prolonged) (Denslow 1996).

About half the world's tropical areas are in the American Neotropics, including southern Mexico to Panama, the Amazon and Orinoco basins in northwestern South America, and central and coastal Brazil. Next in extent are the eastern tropics of the Indo-Malayan region, including Indonesia and continental Southeast Asia.2 The smallest block of tropical rain forest is in western and central Africa, including the Congo Basin.

2 The Indo-Malayan rain forest (also called the eastern rain forest) covers the western Ghats in India and the southwestern corner of Sri Lanka. It is centered on the Malay archipelago, in the phytogeographic region that botanists call Malesia (or Malaysia). The term includes peninsular Thailand, the Bismarck archipelago, and the northwestern corner of New Guinea (Irian Jaya). Furthermore, the IndoMalayan rain forest extends beyond the Malay peninsula into Burma, Indochina, southern China, and Vietnam. Rain forest also covers Indonesia, most of New Guinea, and Borneo (Kalimantan). See Whitmore (1992 10, [figure 2.1 11, 213 [glossary], 223 [index]).

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These large tropical regions are by no means homogeneous. For instance, they differ in species diversity, that is, in the number of plant species present. Of the 170,000 species of flowering plants in the tropics, for example, about half are in the Neotropics, 35,000 are in tropical Africa, and 40,000 are in tropical Asia; the rest are found in Madagascar and Malesia (Whitmore 1992:28). In all of Africa, there are only about 15 genera and 50 species of palms (Whitmore 1992:28), compared with 71 genera and about 800 species in the New World (Henderson 1990:2–3).3 In the Indo-Malayan and Australasian regions, there are at least 93 genera of palms (Uhl and Dransfield 1987:550–3) and over 1,000 species. Although those three regions share plant families, they have few plant genera and even fewer species in common. The distribution of some kinds of vertebrates is similar. For example, 1,300 avian species exist in the Neotropics, 900 in the Asian tropics, and 400 in the African tropics (Myers 1992). With the exception of primates, fewer mammal species exist in Africa than in the other two regions.

Despite their diversity, some forests throughout the tropics are monospecific—that is, they are dominated by a single species of canopy trees—and can occur next to mixed-species, old-growth forests (Hart and others 1989; Hart 1990). Thus, it is possible for fruiting trees, including trees that might yield fruit edible for humans, to occur in large stands throughout particular forests. This phenomenon might have enabled forest peoples to survive in tropical regions during preagricultural times.

Rain-Forest Environments and “Pure” Hunter-Gatherers

During the last decade, scholars have vigorously debated the problem of whether foraging peoples (that is, hunter-gatherers) could have lived in mature forests without cultivating plants or domesticating animals or could have lived independently of their agricultural neighbors, with whom they exchanged forest products for food crops (Harlan 1995; Hladik and Dounias 1993; Piperno and Pearsall 1998:76–8). Those who argue against the possibility of foragers living independently portray the tropical rain forest as having limited food resources, especially wild starches and animals with adequate fat reserves (Hart and Hart 1986; Headland 1987; Bailey and others 1989). The Mbuti Pygmies of the Ituri Forest in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) are used as an example of how these constraints operate. It is said that in the Ituri Forest, important foodplant species, including yams, are rare, sparsely distributed, or seasonal—as are other products, such as honey, grubs, and caterpillars—and that the mammals hunted are lean most of the year. In fact, however, large areas of the Ituri Forest are monospecific, dominated by the edible species Gilbertiodendron dewevrei, which

3 Genera and species numbers are constantly being revised and should be accepted with caution. For example, Corner (1966, 230, table 2) lists 255 genera and 2,009 species of New World palms; 24 years later, Henderson (1990:2–3) reduced these numbers drastically. Here, I have used Henderson's estimates.

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produces sizable, starchy seeds. Although this tree yields for only 3 months of the year (October–December), other foods are abundant at other periods, including honey (May and June), termites (November), and fat animals (the dry season). Thus, seasonality might be important, but the seasons of abundant food tend to be staggered. Moreover, recent studies of the standing biomass of wild yams in the forests used by Pygmies have revealed year-round availability and considerable density (3–6 kg/hectare), certainly high enough for sparse populations to survive (Hladik and Dounias 1993). In fact, it has been estimated that even at a very low yam density of 2 kg/hectare, one Aka Pygmy camp of 26 persons foraging in a 2-km radius could feed itself on yams alone for 6 months; of course, other wild plant and animal foods are also available (Bahuchet and others 1991).

Other forest foragers, in Malaysia and the Philippines, also consume large amounts of wild yams. Some Pygmy groups, such as the Baka, encourage the regeneration of wild yams by carefully reburying the heads of the plants after harvesting them, a management technique that could have been used for other wildforest resources as well (Dounias 1993). Other plant species in other continents also are conserved; for example, palms are protected and tended in Amazonia, and the sago palm is carefully pruned by some foragers in Southeast Asia.

Recent excavations of 10 archaeological sites in the Ituri Forest of the northeastern Congo Basin confirmed that hunter-gatherers who exploited wild vegetable-oil resources were living in the African tropical rain forest in the 11th millennium BC, during Pleistocene times (Mercader 1997).

Today, hunter-gatherers might not consume as much wild food, simply because it is less work to obtain cultivated foods through trade. Thus, Efe Pygmy huntergatherers and Lese farmers in the Ituri Forest have become economically interdependent. The Efe exchange wild meat, honey, medicines, and their labor for crops that the Lese raise—such as manioc, plantains, rice, and peanuts—and for such items as metal tools, cloth, and pots (Wilkie 1988). Despite this symbiosis, the Efe have maintained their separate ethnic identity and cultural ways, if not their language. They have had a limited effect on the forest, scarcely more permanent or disruptive of ecosystem functioning than are the natural processes of forest disturbance.

The same might not be true of all hunter-gatherers. The aborigines that once inhabited Kangaroo Island in Australia, for example, had a marked impact on the forest. Well before the Europeans arrived, they had transformed naturally occurring thickets on the mainland into open woodlands (Harlan 1995). Elsewhere in Australia, native peoples flooded forests and built ditches to increase the abundance of wild plants and fish. They also dug up yams of the genus Dioscorea so intensively that the churned-up fields “resembled plowed fields” (Harlan 1995:11). Other “advanced” hunter-gatherers planted seeds, fertilized with ashes, settled in villages, and reached high population densities without domesticating either plants or animals. Only when and if their manipulative practices involved the deliberate selection and enhancement of useful traits in plant populations—altering their genetic makeup—can we talk of plant domestication. The initial stages of this process are known as horticulture, and its later stages as fully developed agriculture.

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Ancient Agricultural Developments.

Continental differences in the availability of plants and animals suitable for domestication presumably led to very different early patterns of food procurement and production in different regions of the world (Diamond 1997). Actually, a very small number of plant species provide the bulk of the food consumed by the world's population. Common opinion has it that none of the major crops originated in tropical forests—that most economically important plants came from areas with low species diversity, such as the Middle East (or southwestern Asia), Eurasia, Mesoamerica, the Andes, and North Africa. Grains belonging to the grass family (for example, wheat, maize, rice, millet, and sorghum) and legumes (for example, beans, peas, peanuts, or groundnuts) all were cultivated first in independent centers of domestication that had marked dry and wet periods. Moreover, the five major big herbivores that were domesticated in the Old World had the same original distributions as the staple plants: sheep and goats from western Asia, and cattle, pigs, and horses from Eurasia and North Africa.

Recent evidence suggests, however, that the tropics did not lag behind other centers of early plant domestication (Friedberg 1996). In the highlands of New Guinea, native species of taro, bananas, and yams might have been domesticated by 9,000 years ago (Bayliss-Smith 1966:507–8; Golson 1997). In the tropics of southwestern Ecuador, Colombia, and Panama, squash (Cucurbita), maize, bottle gourd, avocado, and lerén (Sp.), or Calathea, a minor root or tuber crop, and perhaps also Maranta (arrowroot) were being planted by horticulturists between 10,000 and 7,000 years ago (Piperno and Pearsall 1998:182–227). In the southern Guianas, northeastern Brazil, and the Orinoco Venezuelan region, indirect evidence suggests that manioc and sweet potatoes also might have been cultivated early (Piperno and Pearsall 1998:230–2 table 4.5). Thus, in those tropical areas and perhaps in other regions, such as tropical Africa, that are less well known archaeologically, food production could have been more precocious than was thought previously.

In any case, complex centralized states and stratified chiefdoms eventually also flourished in those tropical areas. Some examples are the ancient Maya civilization of Mesoamerica, the chiefdoms of Central America and northwestern South America, the Mon Khmer states of Cambodia, the African forest kingdoms of Ghana and Nigeria, and the Polynesian chiefdoms of Hawaii and Tahiti. When Europeans reached the Old World and New Old World tropics, they encountered an amazing array of diverse peoples whose cultural accomplishments rivaled those of nontropical indigenous groups. Many of those cultures did not survive the diseases and destruction wrought on them by the newcomers. Thus, present conditions reflect poorly the great diversity that once existed among tropical-forest societies.

People of the Tropical Forests

As I already indicated, the biological diversity of tropical forests is not the same around the world. Has that affected the number of societies that various forest

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ecosystems could support? A crude estimate, based on the number of ethnographically described groups that inhabit or in the recent past inhabited the main tropical areas of the world, reveals that it has not. Tropical America and tropical Africa are home to 434 and 445 ethnic groups, respectively; Southeast Asia and the Pacific (excluding Australia) harbor an additional 539 groups (Price 1990). Although humans have developed broadly similar types of ecological and economic adaptations in all three regions, a great deal of cultural diversity occurs at the local level. For example, the members of 46 households in a single Amazonian village (Santa Rosa, on the Ucayali River of Peru) practice 12 distinct types of agriculture and employ 39 strategies of resource use that they constantly modify over the short term (Padoch and de Jong 1992). In all these cases, cultural diversity can occur at inter-ethnic as well as intra-ethnic levels.

Hunter-Gatherers

Let us return to the so-called Pygmies of central Africa. At least 10 ethnolinguistically distinct populations of these foragers are found unevenly distributed throughout the Congo Basin and adjacent areas. They differ markedly in subsistence and settlement patterns, as they do in other cultural aspects (Hewlett 1996). For example, the Efe hunt with bows, the Mbuti and Aka with nets, and the Baka with spears. Among the net hunters, female Mbuti participate in the hunt, but female Aka do not. Whereas the Efe and the Baka spend 4–5 months a year in the forest and camp close to villages, the Mbuti and Aka spend as long as 8 months in the forest, camp far away, and eat less food from the village. Although all these groups rely to some extent on cultivated foods today, they still make extensive use of diverse forest resources. Thus, the Mbuti of the Ituri Forest use more than 100 species of plants and over 200 species of animals for food, even though a much smaller number of species provide the bulk of their diet. In fact, the four distinct groups of Mbuti foragers have different cultural preferences for different foods (Ichikawa 1993). Research on these African foragers therefore suggests that as much cultural variability exists within the same ethnic group as between groups: the locus of diversity is not only cross-cultural but also intracultural. This diversity is only loosely related to the specific resources at hand. It also must be explained with reference to particular historical experiences that have shaped social processes, such as the systems of belief, the technologies used, and the division of labor by gender.

Turning now to Southeast Asia, a few distinct groups of hunter-gatherers remain in the tropical forests of Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Sumatra, and Borneo. On the island of Borneo, for example, live the Penan, who hunt wild boar and other animals and collect a wide variety of plants for food, especially the starch of the sago palm, which they prune regularly; they also use plants for shelter and craft materials (Hutterer 1998). Like most Southeast Asian and African foragers, the Penan rely on exchanges with their agricultural neighbors, trading mats and baskets for rice. Like many other foragers, they are struggling to save their forests. Other Southeast Asian groups exchange wild meat, resins, beeswax, medicinal plants, and other forest products with agriculturalists, even though they have the resources and know-how to survive solely on wild food species. Hence,

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their adaptations to the forest are not only highly variable, but also different from those of their pre-agricultural ancestors thousands of years ago.

Amazonia is a third large tropical area where very diverse groups of humans still rely heavily on wild forest products that are hunted, gathered, and fished, in addition to the practice of slash-and-burn cultivation. Their knowledge of the forest is vast and accurate. It is believed that the Yanomami of Venezuela could have subsisted on wild products alone, provided that they remained numerically small, mobile, and able to exploit the diversity of microenvironments in their habitat (Good 1995). The Yuqui of lowland Bolivia might have remained true foragers until relatively recently, exploiting the patchwork dynamics of the forest through constant mobility, overlapping sexual roles, and active sharing of information (Stearman 1995). Their fine-tuned knowledge of the fruiting phenology of plants and the feeding behavior of animals sees them though periods of resource scarcity. Their Tupi-Guaraní relatives, the neighboring Siriono, were also primarily a trekking society before they became sedentary in the 1940s and 1950s. Although wild game is still very important in their diet, the Siriono make their camps on artificial mounds that were built up by previous horticulturalists in the midst of seasonally flooded lowlands (bajuras Sp.; Holmberg 1960). On these abandoned mounds, the Siriono gather the semidomesticated palms and fruit trees that had been planted by their predecessors (Balée 1995). Hence, like most foraging groups today, the Siriono no longer rely entirely on wild products from the forest.

Swidden or Slash-and-Burn Agriculture

Despite enormous variation, swidden cultivation (the temporary clearing of forested land to grow crops)—also known as shifting cultivation, long-term fallow cultivation, and so on—still prevails in parts of the tropics around the world where population densities are relatively low and land is available for rotational forms of agriculture. The system is essentially the same everywhere it is practiced. During the dry season, the forest (usually secondary) is cleared, and trees are felled. Then the vegetation is burned just before the rains begin, and various plants are planted on the ashes in a manner that generally imitates the wild vegetation they replace (Harris 1972). In fact, “by substituting a diverse assemblage of cultivated plants for the wild species of the forest this type of polycultural conuco stimulates much more closely than monocultural plots do the structure and dynamics of the natural forest ecosystem” (Harris 1971:481). The same parcel may be cultivated for 2–3 years and then lie fallow for 5–20 years to restore its fertility. Not only soil depletion, but also weed growth and insect pests can force farmers to clear new land. The need for fallow periods requires that large tracts of land be held in reserve. In terms of labor input per unit time, however, swidden cultivation is often more productive than more labor-intensive methods of permanent cropping.

Those general statements aside, it is important to emphasize that people use a great array of planting techniques, crop combinations, and rotational practices in their swidden systems, even within the same general area. In West Africa, for example, the Sakata of the Democratic Republic of the Congo clear and burn

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plots in the forest, sparing such economically useful trees as the kola and the oil palm (Grove and Klein 1979). They then plant manioc or cassava, maize, plantains, and bananas on mounds and abandon each plot after 3 years of use. They also grow vegetables, sweet potatoes, and other crops in gardens near their dwellings. In contrast, the Zande, who also live in the Congo, plant groundnuts and maize, finger millet, sorghum, and other minor crops. Although they might plant manioc in the third year, they are more dependent on grain crops than the Sakata are. It is difficult to find swidden farmers anywhere in tropical Africa who do not grow commercial crops as well, on a more permanent basis, such as oil palms, cocoa, coffee, and tea in the highlands. Growing single crops (monocrops) for the export market can increase the number of diverse groups that can live in a given region, but it can also reduce considerably the diversity of crops grown for subsistence purposes.

Swidden cultivation is still practiced widely in some tropical areas of the Indo-Malayan region (Aubaile-Sallenave 1997; Spencer 1966). Well known among swidden agriculturists are the Hanunóo of Mindoro in the Philippines, who grow or grew at least 430 cultivars, 40 or more of which can be planted in the same swidden plot, in parcels that they cultivated for 3 years and allowed to lie fallow for 8 years (Conklin 1957). Other, less well-known groups, like the Gidra of Papua New Guinea, are also swidden cultivators. The Gidra who live in inland villages rely on starch from the sago palm and meat from wild animals, whereas those who live in riverine villages rely more on garden crops and fishing (Ohtsuka 1996). Until recently, the former adaptation was the more successful of the two, but the sale of garden crops and the adoption of modern fishing technologies has conferred advantages to the riverine adaptation; this is another example of how intraethnic diversity can be created by outside influences.

The Kuikuru of central Brazil not only can name 191 trees, but also display an intimate knowledge of the multiple uses of 138 of them—many of them palms—including their role in feeding the animals that they hunt (Carneiro 1988). The Kuikuru cultivate 11 varieties of bitter manioc plus maize and several other food crops in swidden plots that average 0.61 hectare (1.5 acres), which they carefully plant and weed for 3 years, then abandon for as long as 25 years (Carneiro 1961). Kuikuru gardens produce 4–5 tons of manioc tubers per acre per year. Enough forest is available for clearing within walking distance of any village for settlements to be permanent. When the 150 or so inhabitants of a village change location, it is not for ecological reasons but for internal social pressures, most often disputes. Thus, as long as the population remains relatively small and the forest large, the swidden systems of the Kuikuru and some other Amazonian groups do not necessarily destroy the natural vegetation, even though they inevitably alter the species composition of the forest.

That does not mean, however, that all Amerindian tropical groups were equally well adapted to their environment. The Trumai, who lived along the Upper Xingu River in Brazil, not far from the Kuikuru, were much less successful. When they were first contacted by Europeans in the late 1930s, the total population was only 43 (25 in 1955 and possibly none today), and their tiny manioc gardens, of less than 0.2 hectare (0.5 acre) each, were barely large enough to feed their

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households (Murphy and Quain 1955). Constantly under attack from their neighbors, and lacking leadership and strong kin ties, their community was breaking down despite their not having had face-to-face contact with Western society. Although introduced diseases had reduced their numbers, the recentness of their move into the region from the Southeast was the principal factor in their demise. Ecological conditions could not have differed greatly between the two regions, but the Trumai had not yet formed alliances through marriage and political ties with neighboring groups that would have permitted them to live peacefully in this ethnically diverse area. Hence, the particular social history of an individual group, including its relations with its neighbors, and not only environmental constraints or direct contact with nonindigenous peoples, can contribute substantially to the shape of its future.

Indigenous Forms of Agricultural Intensification

Agricultural production can be increased by applying ever larger amounts of labor to improving small parcels that are cropped permanently, rather than by enlarging the amount of land that is cultivated. Many agricultural peoples in the tropics, including swidden farmers, also practice some form of more intensive permanent cultivation. Frequently, they make small, permanent house gardens (also called home or dooryard gardens), in which they plant a diversified mixture of trees, vines, bushes, grains, root crops, medicinal plants, and spices, and fertilize them with kitchen debris and animal dung. House gardens play an important ecological and economic role. For example, among the Ibo of eastern Nigeria, who are short of land, a compound garden is a diverse plant community that can include 60 species, including tubers, vegetables, maize, small and large trees, and palms (Ruthenberg 1976). Although it occupies scarcely 2% of the land farmed by the Ibo household, the garden produces half the crops consumed. In Java, the house garden is also a complex and dynamic ecosystem made up of tuberous plants at ground level, bushes and small trees (such as papaya and banana) at the middle levels, and tall fruit trees at the upper level. A closed canopy helps to control weeds and lessens erosion, and the decaying vegetation produces fertilizer, imitating natural-forest dynamics and causing minimal environmental degradation. Here, anywhere from 15 to 75% of the land may be dedicated to gardens that provide more than 40% of the caloric requirements of the household and more than 20% of its monetary income (Stoler 1978). On the other extreme are the groups of rural Jola in southern Senegal who do not make house gardens at all or, if they live near towns, grow introduced, foreign vegetables, mostly for sale in the market rather than for household use.

Agroforestry is a variant of the house-garden option; by incorporating trees into the agricultural landscape, it also reproduces the structure and dynamics of the natural forest. In Indonesia, for example, fruit trees of local forest species often are cultivated, as are bamboo, useful fibers, and so forth, all of which are only slightly modified genetically (Michon and Bompard 1987). Indeed, many of the species in these special forests are protected and tended but not necessarily planted deliberately. These systems often surround the village, linking the

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agrarian landscape with the natural forest. In southern Sumatra, agroforestry accounts for more than half the territory and is based on multiple species of trees—in some areas more than 300. This culturally created forest might have a greater biomass than the “natural” forest has (400–700 trees/hectare, compared with 500 trees/hectare, respectively), and they are similar in density and structure. The wood, resins, fibers, and so forth from these trees bring monetary revenue, and the fruits are used as complementary food.

In central Sumatra, planting trees, or favoring their spontaneous regeneration, legitimizes a farmer's rights to productive land. Customary rules dictate that “the land near the lake belongs to those who make it fruitful” (Aumeeruddy 1994:23). If productive trees—including commercial timber species, coffee, and cinnamon—are not grown in these highly diverse agroforest gardens, the land will be taken back by local community authorities, namely the customary chiefs, and assigned to others. In pioneer fronts, however, collective control of scarce resources is weak or nonexistent. Wealthy farmers are cutting down the forest to plant profitable cash crops. Monocrops are now being grown on hillside areas where a wise and carefully managed complex agroforestry system would have prevented the rampant erosion that is now menacing the fragile soils. This is one more example of how profit can compromise future productivity.

Among the Chiripa, a Guaraní people living in Paraguay, agroforestry has taken a different course than in Indonesia. The Chiripa integrate subsistence gardening and hunting with commercial harvesting from the forest of yerba mate leaves, which are used to make a kind of tea that is drunk widely by Paraguayans. “Rather than simply harvesting foliage, however, yerbateros have developed techniques that protect the standing trees and promote the growth of new ones” (Reed 1995:27). Stages in the production cycle—first gardens, then fallows that are still managed for food, and finally trees—replicate the natural succession of tropical ecosystems. Unlike their nonindigenous, mestizo neighbors who work as hired labor in such enterprises as logging under a coercive patronage system, Chiripa yerbateros belong to independent communities that comprise nuclear families integrated through bilateral kin ties and affiliation to elderly religious leaders. These enduring social institutions are not simply defined by productive relations; they are the principal explanation of why and how the Chiripa have survived as an ethnic group. Thus, agroforestry can allow indigenous peoples to participate in the national economy without irreversible damage to the environment, provided that they have the right social institutions in place.

In some societies, the entire farming system can rely on intensive techniques. The Kofyar of the Jos Plateau in Nigeria enhanced the natural productivity of the soil by making permanent, terraced homestead fields where crops are intermixed and heavily fertilized with dung from corralled goats. With no more than simple tools, small, independent Kofyar households can grow most of the family food (Netting 1968). The Jola of Senegal and other peoples living on the swampy coastal lands of the Upper Guinea coast cultivate wet (irrigated) rice in permanent diked paddy fields that are annually transplanted on with a single crop (Linares 1981). An individual family owns parcels in all the important sections of the rice fields, improving soil fertility by careful tilling and controlling water

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quality by diking and draining. Through centuries of careful experimentation, the Jola have developed multiple varieties (landraces) of the West African rice species Oryza glaberrima, to which they have added introduced varieties of the Asian species Oryza sativa, thus staggering harvest time and other labor requirements and spreading the risk of failure if precipitation is insufficient. As among the Kofyar, land among the Jola is privately owned but inalienable, and production is organized on the basis of independent nuclear households that exchange labor rather than extended households or larger lineages (Linares 1992). These social organizational features can, in fact, be shared by other intensive farmers elsewhere.

The rice economies of East and Southeast Asia vary in the intensity with which they use land, labor, and capital, but most farmers grow at least two crops a year, using household or family labor, exchange organizations, and irrigation societies (Bray 1986). Rice cultivation is used as the basis of economic diversification into commercial cropping and manufacturing. The combination of rice, fish, and silk production creates an enriched, diversified ecosystem capable of sustaining very high population densities (as in Java with 600 persons/km2).

Conclusions

The examples discussed above suggest that most tropical forests have been inhabited by humans for a long time; to one degree or another, these forests are anthropogenic, having been transformed through human agency. Everywhere, indigenous groups have developed diverse and ingenious techniques to incorporate the biological diversity inherent in tropical forests into cultural patterns of resource use. Regardless of whether they are hunter-gatherers or intensive agriculturalists, some of their practices have had little effect on the environment and others have greatly modified it. In all instances, the particular lifeways that have emerged are a product of historical processes of cumulative social change and continuing adaptation. Culture is not in any simple way determined by nature, but rural economies are doubtless forged in the mutual interaction of humans with the diverse ecosystems that they occupy. In the process of engaging nature, indigenous farmers have created hundreds of varieties of cultivated plants (landraces), thus increasing food security through plant genetic diversity that confers resistance to pests, pathogens, and adverse climatic conditions. That is only one of the many ways in which local peoples have actually increased diversity.

Clearly, then, indigenous peoples have the capacity to transform tropical rainforest environments without destroying their biodiversity. “Cultural knowledge leads to different land-management practices that increase biological diversity—protection of sacred forests, building and maintaining hedgerows, planting a diversity of crops and varieties, and protecting plants in the forest” (Brush 1996:2–3). Such practices are generally sustainable as long as population numbers are kept down and land continues to be plentiful or as long as access by densely settled peoples to scarce resources, such as fertile soils, is carefully managed for the common good. Even under ideal conditions, however, examples of tropical forest peoples who misuse resources can be cited: in the Amazon, they overexploit game and fish populations; in Northern Luzon, they deforest (Lawless 1978); in the

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Upper Guinea coast, during years of drought, they cut down and burn palm groves to grow rice (Beye and Eychenne 1990). But those instances do not add up to a worldwide systematic and massive assault by native peoples on their resource base.

Before the 1950s, deforestation rates in the world's low-latitude tropical forests were “of negligible proportions” (Jones and Hollier 1997:317). Since then, conditions have changed; the world's tropical forests and the people living within them are increasingly under threat from overpopulation; from land-hungry peasants, unskilled migrants, loggers, miners, and cattle ranchers; from government projects to build roads and dams; and from commercial plantations and crop monocultures. Cultural diversity is being reduced even faster than biological diversity. Within the next century, 90% of the world's languages might disappear (Krauss 1992; Maffi 1998). It is estimated that in Brazil alone there were 230 indigenous cultures in 1900 but only 87 in 1957 (Sponsel 1995). With the loss of lives goes the loss of cultural knowledge about the forest and the myriad beneficial uses to which people can put its plants and animals as food, medicines, dyes, fibers, industrial materials, and so forth. But the forest itself is also disappearing fast. Close to 3 million hectares of Amazon forest are being cut down every year. Between 1990 and 2020, tropical deforestation might wipe out 5–15% of the world's 10 million species of plants and animals, or a yearly loss of 15,000–50,000 species (Reid and Miller 1989:37). If forest alterations by logging and surface fires are taken into account, however, the present rate of annual deforestation in Brazil's Amazonian region may be underestimated by a factor of 35–50% (Nepstad and others 1999). Doubtless, we are facing cultural and biological extinction rates of unprecedented magnitude.

There are no easy, blanket solutions to halt this destruction, for it is rooted in intractable socioeconomic problems having to do with overpopulation, poverty, neglect, exploitation, and commercial greed. Added to these is the precarious and ambiguous juridical status in which indigenous groups in the African, Asian, and American tropics find themselves (Grenand 1993). What seems evident, however, is that whatever diversity is inherent in tropical forests can be protected only by using diverse means and methods, to be applied alone or in combination, often case by case, with the full participation and empowerment of the local populations affected. In most instances, farmers must be compensated for safeguarding, in situ, crop genetic diversity (Orlove and Brush 1996; Wilkes 1991). In other instances, new forms of gaining a livelihood must be found for people living in protected areas; and educational opportunities must be extended to them (Redford and Mansour 1996). In many cases, local populations must be granted secure land rights before they are willing to conserve their patrimony. Intellectual-property protection and prospecting contracts for indigenous communities might work in some cases (Brush and Stabinsky 1996; Greaves 1994). Nonetheless, caution should be exercised in this connection (Cleveland and Murray 1997). Governments in the developing world must enforce legislation that respects the rights of poor rural peoples and should offer them new incentives to develop productive and profitable farms. The increased use of such arrangements as debts for nature swaps and restrictive measures—such as prohibiting the exploitation of particular trees for timber, imposing selective tariffs, taxing extractivist

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activities, and outlawing illicit mining—should also help to ensure a wise use of the forest. And among the citizens of the industrial world, a less rapacious attitude toward the resources of their southern neighbors should be encouraged.

In every instance, the general rule should be “to put more faith in the rural population, the people whose way of life depends on how well they manage their biological resources” (McNeely and Ness 1996, p 64). Everywhere, but crucially in the world's tropical forests, fulfilling cultural needs and conserving biodiversity must proceed hand in hand.

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