Experimental assessment of innovative slash-and-burn cultivation practices for sustainable land use and deforestation prevention in Central Menabe, Madagascar
Project
Funding :
Swiss Program for Research on Global Issues for Development (http://www.r4d.ch/)
Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation SDC
Swiss National Science Foundation
Year : 2013-2017
Description :
Slash and burn agriculture is practiced in many regions of Madagascar, causing deforestation problems. In the Menabe region, on the western coast, one registers between 1991 and 2000 a forest loss of 0.7 to 1.1%. Fields are cultivated during three to four years with maize crops, then the land is abandoned. At that point, about 30 years of fallow are necessary to recover a decent fertility level. So far, politics and NGOs blame rural households as the cause of natural habitat loss because of their practice of slash-and-burn agriculture. Nevertheless, from the point of view of local communities, this practice is a way to preserve soil fertility as long as traditional rules are respected, and in turn they blame “migrant” communities for breaking rules while slashing and burning.
The SNF r4d AGRIFEU project is an attempt to bring together different stakeholders for exploring experimentally alternative practices. The overall project aims at (1) analysing the practice of slash-and-burn cultivation in the Menabe region, (2) assessing the different approaches by farmers and their benefit for the local population, (3) determining the potential of adapting practices for optimal use and sustainability of soils and associated services and (4) exploring experimentally alternative practices such as selective slash-and-burn. The project is supposed to constitute a first step towards the development of management strategies which will balance conservation of habitats and development of agriculture and thus minimize the impact on natural undisturbed forest.
Keywords :
Tropical agriculture, slash-and-burn cultivation, soil fertility, ecosystem services, Madagascar, dry forest, compost, rural household
Internal collaborators :
Prof. Alexandre Buttler – PI
Dr. Bjorn Robroek – Postdoc researcher
Justine Gay-des-Combes – PhD
Partnership :
University of Antananarivo
ForDev group, ETH, Zürich
Study site :
Kirindy forest, Menabe region, Madagascar
Report of closing meeting, June 2017:
https://documents.epfl.ch/groups/e/ec/ecos-unit/www/Presentations_total.pdf
https://documents.epfl.ch/groups/e/ec/ecos-unit/www/R%C3%A9sum%C3%A9_total_SLZ-AB.pdf