SLASH-AND-BURN AGRICULTURE: The Search for Alternatives

The contributors are to be congratulated for advancing the state of knowledge with regard to such issues as measurement of greenhouse gases as a result of tropical land-use change; for providing detailed case studies of tropical land-use change in Brazil, Cameroon, and Indonesia; for making a determined and generally successful effort to compare and contrast the individual case studies so that the authors could make higher-level generalizations; and for creating a consortium that is international in scope and focused not just on academic research but also on policy. The fifteen authors think that the appropriate framework for understanding tropical deforestation is one that includes proximate causes (infrastructure extension, agricultural expansion, and wood extraction) that are driven by underlying causes (demography, economics, technology, policy and institutional factors, and culture) and, in addition, that the interaction between proximate and underlying causes is effected by other factors (predisposing environmental factors, biophysical drivers, and social trigger events).