Ethnoecology, Resource Use, Conservation And Development In A ...

people prepare a second field dedicated mostly to peanuts, a cash crop. This task is
given lower priority than the growth of food for home consumption, in that it is
undertaken later. During 2000, the early onset of the rains took many farmers by
surprise. Many people reported that they had been unable to burn fields they had
begun preparing for peanuts. However, all of these had managed to finish work on
their fields of cassava and other subsistence crops. Most crops are harvested on a
continuous basis when available. The capacity of cassava to resist spoilage in the soil
means it is available year-round; most other crops exhibit seasonality to greater or
lesser degrees. The division of labour in agriculture is not rigid: men are responsible
for site selection and heavy work such as clearing the undergrowth and felling, while
most of the other tasks are done jointly.
Around five years is regarded as the minimum fallow period, with at least nine
considered ideal; however in practice many farms are left fallow for far longer.
Individuals or families retain rights of ownership over their fallows, in that anyone
wanting to cut a farm on a site previously farmed by another must obtain the
permission of the prior user. These rights are inherited cognatically, and are inevitably
asserted because fallows and other areas of secondary growth are preferred to
primary forest as sites for new fields. This is because of the high labour input involved
in cutting down mature trees, the most arduous and dangerous task involved in
clearing a new farm. The retention of ownership rights is important in the long-term
agricultural cycle. In a lineage that is expanding in numbers, whose inheritance of old
farm sites is therefore insufficient to fulfil their future agricultural needs, men in their
youth or prime will cut their farms in primary forest in order to establish an area of
old farms within which they will be able to cut fields when they reach old age.
The allocation of agricultural land seems to vary among villages. One village
allocates specific areas sufficient to encompass active fields and fallows on a
household-by-household basis, and prohibits the cutting of fields in another's
designated area. Unlike the traditional system from Maruranau described above, this
appears to be the outcome of council regulations which were introduced in recent
years as a response to a local shortage of easily accessible farmland. These findings
contradict those of previous studies (ARU 1992; Salisbury 1968: 10; Hills 1968: 62-
63), which reported that ownership of fallows was not retained, and that there were
no restrictions on where a new farm might be located. A similar conclusion was
reached in a study of Waiwai land use (Dagon 1967b). Retention of ownership rights
over fallows has been reported in studies of other swidden agriculturalists, including
the Iban of Sarawak (Horowitz 1998). The contradiction between this finding and