The history and revival of swidden agriculture research in the tropics

Abstract

Swidden agriculture used to occur in the temperate zones and currently occurs almost exclusively in the tropics. Academic research on the millennium-long farming system did not occur until the mid-eighteenth century, followed by scattered and sporadic research work before the twentieth century. So far, a thematic review of the history of swidden agriculture research based on the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) Web of Science, which provides the longest coverage from 1900 to the present, has not yet been reported. The lack of a 20th-century literature review restricts understanding the revival of swidden agriculture research. With the journal publications (including Articles, Review Articles, and Data Papers) indexed by Web of Science and Google Scholar, we divided the history of swidden agriculture research into three developmental stages: descriptive transcription, critical analysis, and comprehensive analysis, with the years of 1957 and 2008 as the watershed years, respectively. Notably, 2008 emerged as a watershed year for the revival of swidden agriculture research in the tropics. Launching and implementing the United Nations Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries promotes top-down rethink and rediscovery. In contrast, the free Landsat archive provides bottom-up support for consistent historical satellite observations. The synchronic emergence of the UN-REDD Programme and the free Landsat data policy may be coincidental. Yet, their combination and the global economic crisis since 2008 have become a catalyst and impetus for putting the longitudinal and horizontal analyses of swidden agriculture together. After a century of debate, swidden agriculture is gaining the academic attention it deserves.