| Summary: | In Laos, as in much of Southeast Asia, swidden agriculture is commonly blamed as a
primary driver of forest loss. The foremost policy initiative of the Lao Department of Forestry
is to replace traditional swidden agriculture with other forms of rural livelihood. This has
percolated down to donor-supported management planning for the largest nature reserve in
Laos or Vietnam, Nakai-Nam Theun National Protected Area (NNT NPA) in the Annamite
Mountains of central Laos. But 'swidden' is a collective term for a spectrum of cultivation
strategies of varying intensity and environmental consequences, and its presumed
deleterious impact on the forest cover of NNT NPA is an untested assumption. I tested the
assumption by methods of historical ecology, plotting the patterns of NNT's forest cover and
human settlement over the past several decades. Principal sources of data were
topographic maps dating back to 1943, and Landsat images from 1976, 1989 and 2001.
The analysis showed that, although NNT has been inhabited for hundreds and
possibly thousands of years, it retained more than 95% forest cover until the mid-1960s.
Subsequently, forest declined at 0.5%/year until the 1980s, followed by an increase of ca.
0.3%/year to the present day. Over the same period, forest cover declined in Laos as a
whole at 1.7%/year, and in two protected areas near NNT at more than 3%/year. The earlier
deforestation that occurred in NNT, to the 1980s, expanded little into the unbroken forest of
the reserve, but was contained almost entirely within a swidden/forest mosaic whose
boundaries already existed in the 1960s. At present, the main pressure on NNT's forest is
from villages outside the reserve's northern border, not within.
Two factors best account for the stability of NNT's forest cover in the face of
increasing population. First, human settlement has been remarkably stable in NNT since at
least the 1940s, with few changes in the number or location of villages. This stability places
practical limits on the extent of forest clearance by the area's residents. Population density
within the existing swidden/forest mosaic (about 1/5 of NNT's area) is probably still below
carrying capacity for swidden livelihoods. Second, NNT has seen an unprecedented
escalation in wildlife trade in the last twenty years. Income earned from wildlife trade may
have allowed NNT's residents to purchase rice to feed growing populations, instead of
clearing more forest to grow it.
The implication for management is that swidden itself is not the primary threat to
NNT's forest, growing human population is. Given limitations on agricultural intensification in
NNT, in the absence of population stabilization efforts to suppress wildlife trade could
stimulate an increase in swidden, and vice-versa. === Science, Faculty of === Zoology, Department of === Graduate
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