Change over time in a farming system based on shifting cultivation of hill rice in Sarawak, Malaysia

Shifting cultivation is, for around half of Sarawak's farm households, the traditional means of growing a subsistence crop of rice. It is, however, widely regarded as damaging to the environment and unsustainable in its present form, given high rates of rural population increase.

The second of these conclusions was confirmed by a socio-economic survey in 1973/74 of three villages practising a farming system based on shifting cultivation. The report on this survey forecast that farmers would turn increasingly from shifting cultivation to cash-crop production, even though this involved their entering commodity markets under uncertain if not unfavourable terms of trade.

A re-survey of the same villages in 1982 showed this forecast to be seriously inaccurate. The area under shifting cultivation had increased to absorb a sizeable population increase while cash-crop production had decreased. In one land-scarce village, mature rubber gardens had been felled in order to plant rice. Income from non-agricultural employment (mainly in the form of migrant remittances) had largely replaced the income previously earned from cash crops.

Levels of living were judged not to have declined between 1973/74 and 1982 and possibly to be more secure in the short term since they were less dependent on commodity prices. However, in the longer term the breakdown of shifting cultivation can still be foreseen, as even in relatively land-abundant villages fallow periods are approaching the critical minimum. Some technologies which use land less extravagantly have recently appeared (one an indigenous technology) and are being promoted by a Government extension service which has recently devoted more resources to work in poor and isolated regions of the State.