Contents & Foreword, Characterizing And ... - IRRI books

The Dzao live in medium-altitude areas; practice rotation of upland rice, maize,and cassava; and have experience in forestry and traditional garden crops. They practiceswidden cultivation by clearing fields from scrub vegetation and cultivating for 2to 4 years, followed by a fallow period of 10 years or more. They are specialists inconstructing terraces on upland slopes for paddy rice.The Thai, Tay, Nung, and Muong live in low areas, intermontane valleys, andriver basins. They practice intensive wet rice agriculture. In growing food crops fortheir own consumption, the Thai prefer sticky rice, whereas the Tay and Nung prefernonsticky rice. The Nung, Tay, Giay, and others inhabit the lowland areas, at the baseof hills and in valley bottoms; paddy rice is their main crop. They have a remarkableirrigation technology for paddy production in terraced land; paddy rice output, however,is not sufficient to satisfy food requirements and they need to plant root cropsand maize on slopes to supplement their diet.Survey design and the data setUsing the a priori information on the upland systems of the northern mountain region,a stratified sampling design was carried out to generate a data set covering a widerange of population density, market access, ethnicity, relative proportion of uplandand lowland areas, and the extent of crop diversification. In the first step, 12 districtsin five mountain provinces were selected. The second step consisted of selecting ineach district two to three communes that differ in ethnicity and degree of marketaccess. Communes were classified as having good or poor market access by contrastingwith other communes in the same district based on their relative degree of accessto the main transportation route (provincial and national roads) and district or provincialcenter markets in terms of physical distance in kilometers, accessibility by vehicles,and existence of a local market. In the final step, 30 to 50 households in eachcommune were randomly selected for structured interviews. In total, 980 householdsin 33 communes were included in the survey. Comparative analysis was carried out atthe household, commune, and district levels. Figure 3 shows the selected sites. Table1 shows the distribution of selected sites and their corresponding demographics, cropdiversification, physical distance to paved roads and district markets, and market accesscharacteristics.Table 2 summarizes the general characteristics of households in areas with poorand good market access. The average farm size is 1.72 and 1.32 ha for the two groupsof households, respectively. Households in locations with good market access aregenerally found at lower altitude, cultivate land with a lower slope, and have morelowland field area per capita. On average, households in these areas have 0.31 ha oflowland compared with 0.22 ha in the poor market access area. The extent of irrigationis greater in the low-slope areas. As a result of irrigation, cropping intensity oflowlands in these areas is higher than in lowlands of the upper slopes where only onecrop of rainfed rice per year is planted. In market-accessible areas, the major cashcrops are improved maize and horticultural crops. The proportionate area devoted tocash crops is usually higher in communes with better access to markets than other-Agricultural commercialization and land-use intensification: . . . 377