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Population Growth and Land Use Intensification in a Subsistence-based Indigenous Community in the Amazon

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Abstract

Shifting cultivation practiced by indigenous peoples living at low population densities in tropical forests has often been described as sustainable and compatible with conservation. However, shifting cultivation at increasing population densities has historically been, and still is, a main cause of deforestation worldwide. As many indigenous peoples in tropical forests currently experience rapid demographic growth, this raises the question to what extent their agricultural activities actually contribute to deforestation. This paper examines land use change in an indigenous community in the Ecuadorian Amazon which is only loosely connected to the market economy, and where agriculture is almost exclusively subsistence oriented. During the last seven decades, people have increasingly begun to clear fallows instead of old-growth forest to farm. Although the population was growing at an estimated 1.6% per year, the expansion of the area of land used for agriculture was only 0.4% per year, corresponding to an annual deforestation rate of only 0.015%. Whereas these changes may seem negligible in terms of deforestation, they do cause hardships to the local people, because of increasing walking distance to old-growth forest, and problems with weeds, pests, and decreasing soil productivity when farming after reclearing fallows.

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Acknowledgements

This article is based on research made during my PhD studies at the Department of Rural Development at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, funded mainly by SIDA. I did the remote sensing and GIS analysis with the help of Eduardo Brondizio and Scott Hetrick at the Anthropological Center for Training and Research on Global Environmental Change, Indiana University, where I spent five months with a fellowship funded by STINT. I reformatted the material in my PhD monograph into this article manuscript when working at the department of biology at the University of Turku, Finland, funded by the Academy of Finland. Thanks to Jan Bengtsson, Eduardo Brondizio, David Gibbon, and two anonymous reviewers for reviewing previous versions of the manuscript. Thanks to my field assistant José Machoa, to the Government Council of Sarayaku, and to all the people of Sarayaku who contributed to this study.

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    Anders Henrik Sirén

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Sirén, A.H. Population Growth and Land Use Intensification in a Subsistence-based Indigenous Community in the Amazon. Hum Ecol 35, 669–680 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-006-9089-y

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