Slash and burn agriculture in Bangladesh: how to encourage alternatives

In the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, a distorted form of slash and burn agriculture, characterised by short rotation, has led to serious degradation of land and forests. Indigenous people have been blamed for the problem. However, this assessment ignores historical reasons for this type of farming and the current obstacles to adopting more sustainable land use practices.

Slash and burn agriculture, locally known as ‘jhum’, is practiced widely in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Itinvolves clearing a patch of land and farming it for one or two seasons beforemoving to another plot. Traditional slash and burn agriculture, with longfallow and short cropping periods, has been practiced sustainably by tribalcommunities in the region since the early nineteenth century.

However, government policy during the British, Pakistaniand post-independence periods, has been significant in altering land use.Research from the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, Nepal,argues that government policies, both past and present, have forced farmers toshorten fallow periods on increasingly poor land. The shortening of the fallowperiod – the time allowed for farmed land to recover after use – and the use ofpoor lands has led to significant deforestation and degradation of land in theregion. Government efforts to encourage alternatives to jhum(such as horticulture and tree farming) have only had partial success. This islargely because of insecure land tenure and insufficient marketing andtransport support services from the government.

Key factors behind land degradation in the Chittagong HillTracts include:

• during the British period, the nationalisationof land and forests (reducing land available for jhum)and the start of large-scale commercial logging
• during the Pakistani period, continuedcommercial extraction of forest products through the establishment of reserveforests, which blocked traditional tribal access
• the construction of a hydroelectric dam that floodedthe most fertile parts of the region, forcing farmers to move to poorer lands
• following independence,the resettlement of lowland people (up to 200,000 in 1992), leading topopulation pressure, a drastic reduction of the fallow period and furthercultivation of poor lands by farmers seeking to avoid food shortages.

Rather than blame indigenous people for the damage causedby slash and burn agriculture, the Bangladeshi government should consider thereasons why people still practise this form of agriculture. The researcherrecommends policies to promote economically and environmentally viable land usepractices, including:

• providing land tenure to farmers
• removing formal and informal taxes that increasemarketing costs for farmers and discourage them from adopting alternative landuses
• adjusting rules that make it difficult for smallfarmers to harvest and market timber grown on private farmland
• promoting competition in trade andtransportation to improve conditions for farmers and encourage tribal people toenter the trade and transport sectors
• making credit more accessible to farmers withoutland certificates
• involving local peoplein decision-making processes.