Forms of Cultivation Found in Asia

Among the forms of cultivation, the most widely prac­ticed form is peasant farming, also known as traditional farming which consists of farming by plowing the soil and planting crops in permanently occupied plots using non-mechanical tools, human and animal muscle, for growing essentially subsistence crops.

A greater part of the population works on the land and depends directly on it for a living. A wide variety of food crops are usually grown for family subsistence, and occasionally a few commercial crops for marketing. Growing several different foods (and other) crops within a small area tend to maintain soil nutrients better than m agricultural systems specializing in monoculture.

In a traditional agricultural system cul­tivation is largely carried on by the use of human and animal muscles, often all mem­bers of the family participate in farming activities, young and old, men and women. Agricultural implements are generally sim­ple and easy to operate by hand or by animals such as a wooden and iron plow, a thresher, a simple weeder, etc.

Specific tasks of planting grains may be regarded as work appropriates for males in some cul­tures, but for females in another. Males generally do the plowing of the fields, while the women do many other tasks, such as transplanting of rice (common in area of intensive rice cultivation), food processing, or supplying water to the field.

Often the majority of the population owns little or no land. Peasants rent land or work as laborers for the landowners who have large holdings. Even though most families depend on agriculture for their livelihood, they do not usually own resources beyond a minimum subsistence.

Farmers usually tend to be conserva­tive and resistant to change. This has led to the perpetuation of the socioeconomic or­der that has developed over a long period of time, representing a time-honored adap­tation to the physical environment. There is a general lack of social mobility. Possi­bilities of life are determined to a large extent by one’s circumstances of birth, which includes gender, birth order within the family, and family’s status within the community.

While these observations may be true of the social and economic orders prevailing in most Asian nations, the tradi­tional systems are particularly well- entrenched in South Asia and Southeast Asia. It may, however, be noted that the traditional agricultural systems are almost everywhere being challenged, and modi­fied by increasing pressures of modernization.

The introduction of the so-called “Green Revolution” in parts of South Asia and Southeast Asia during the 1970s and its subsequent diffusion repre­sents one of such pressures. Among the traditional systems, intensive subsistence ag­riculture in which rice cultivation is the most predominant crop prevails largely in Southeast Asia and East Asia.

Subsistence agriculture, in general, consists of growing food crops primarily of rice for domestic consumption, which occupies the largest territory in Asia, although some commer­cial crops such as jute, sugar cane, or cotton are also grown intensively.

Although the predominant agricul­tural patterns in Asia consist of subsistence cropping or traditional farming, commer­cial production of selected commodities on large plantations or estates occupy large sections of Southeast Asia, and to a lesser extent of South Asia.

The plantations were introduced and controlled by the Europe­ans prior to the independence of these nations, and became a unique feature of the rural occupancy patterns in parts of In­donesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, India, Sri Lanka, and to a smaller degree, of Thai­land, and Myanmar. They are of little Significance in East Asia and Southwest Asia.

The establishment of large, well-man­aged estates required clearing of forests, construction of railroads, roads, harbors, and building of hospitals to treat malaria and other tropical diseases. This necessi­tated the importation of labor from India and China for estates in Malaysia, or from India and Sri Lanka or the integration and channelization of native labor into the newly-introduced plantation system as in the case of Indonesia.

The establishment of political control of India, Sri Lanka and Malaysia by the British, and of Indonesia by the Dutch gave European trading companies’ unrestricted power to have access to the imported or domestic labor supply for the plantations. The introduction of plan­tation system by the injection of European capital and management skills proved to be an exceedingly lucrative undertaking for it utilized cheap labor, but yielding commercial agricultural products com­manding built-in European markets.

While the European masters were amassing large fortunes through the sale of commercial crops, the plantations brought peace, pros­perity, and economic growth to these areas. However, but population growth consequent upon the reclamation of land, and disease control began exerting new pressure on land.

The most disturbing consequences of the plantation system were, however, po­litical. Despite all the dislocations it created for the native economies or the sta­bility it brought to the economic order, the real shortcoming of the plantation sys­tem is not economic at all; it introduced into these nations a persistent, nagging cul­tural intrusion by the importation of di­verse ethnic groups, which became a permanent feature of these countries, and which has since proved inimical to the creation of national cohesion.

The Malay- Chinese-Indian rifts in the Malaysian society and the Tamil-Sinhalese problem are grim reminders of the political conse­quences of the forces, initiated and generated by the ethnic diversity created within the societies of these nations.

Estate or plantation agriculture no longer holds the importance it once did and since independence in these nations not all estates are owned by the foreigners; most have passed into the hands of native administrations. Nearly a third of the plan­tations in rubber in Malaysia, two-thirds of plantation land in Java (Indonesia), most of tea and coffee plantations in Assam (India) and southern India and a good portion of rubber, and coffee plantations, have been distributed to smaller farmers.

There has also been substantial recent expansion of smaller holdings in such crops as maize, abaca, coffee, coconuts, oil palms, pineap­ples, and rubber with the production of crops less oriented to export. Crop diversi­fication on these lands has been increasing recently, rendering overall land-use pat­terns more complex.

Nearly 10 percent of Asia’s territory is given to shifting cultivation or agriculture, a remnant of pre-sedentary cultivation times. It is essentially a farming technique among the cultivators of the tropical, up­land forests, shifting agriculture or slash-and-burn method of cultivation and primarily practiced in Southeast Asia, al­though it is practiced in several other parts of the continent.

In the remote, forested regions of the Outer Islands of Indonesia (Kalimantan, Sulawesi, Halmehera, Seram) 90 percent of the farmers practice some form of it. Among the upland Laotian farmers, in southern islands of the Philip­pines and in northern and eastern uplands of Myanmar shifting cultivation is also widely practiced.

The practice is given a variety of names: caingin in the Philip­pines, tamrai in Thailand, taung-ya in Myanmar, ladang in Malaya and Indone­sia, jhum in India, and chena in Sri Lanka. The term “swidden” has been suggested as a generic name for this type of slash-and- burn cultivation.

The most commonly used method is to make forest clearings on well-drained upland soils by cutting the brush and branches at the beginning of the dry sea­son. When the clearings are dry, the area is burnt, letting the ash fertilize the poor tropical soil. A land is cropped for two or three years until the soil has been tempo­rarily depleted and weed-control becomes difficult. The village then moves to a new nearby location.

This relocation, or rota­tion, ends after ten or fifteen years as the village returns to the original site where the secondary forest cover has reestab­lished itself and soils have regained some fertility. A variety of crops such as maize, root crops (tapioca, yams, and sweet potatoes) are the predominant ones, generally inter­spersed with perennials (pineapples, bananas, or fruit trees). Legumes, green vegetables are now growing in importance as farmers are becoming exposed to new crops.

Shifting cultivation on the scale prac­ticed in these nations has led to several destructive ecological results. The periodic movement of people to new locations, lengthy fallowing of land, exposure to soil fertility, destruction of valuable forest lands and flooding of permanent agricul­tural lands in valley bottoms downstream from forest clearings are some ecologically destructive consequences. Modern nations tend to discourage shifting cultivation practices, as they make census and taxation difficult and destroy timber.

In the modern world, shifting cultiva­tion presents two major problems: one, concerns with modernization, and the other with the growth of population. The first problem lies m the nature of shifting cultivation itself. Most operations in the system are conducted manually, for exam­ple, clearings, sowing, weeding, are done by hand, and occasionally with the use of mechanical handsaws.

Mechanical clearing is expensive and beyond the means of most peasant farmers. The second problem is re­lated to the capacity of shifting cultivation to feed an expanding population. Increase in population implies a progressive shortening of the fallow period, which may hinder the recuperation of soil fertility and result in the eventual decline in yields. As the proportion of fallow land progres­sively decreases, settlements tend to become more permanent resulting in the blurring of distinction between the seden­tary and shifting systems.