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> you are here: In the Field | South America | Bolivia | ||||
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to the programmes Andreas Chileno Rocha dreamed of a new start when he left his smallholding in Cochabamba, an overcrowded farming community in the Andean mountains of Bolivia, for the empty virgin lands of lowland Santa Cruz in the east of the country. Back in the 1960s, the Bolivian government was encouraging migrants by offering free plots of 30-50 hectares to clear and farm. But he found that whenever he cleared the rainforest, the rain washed the fertility from the soil, and within a couple of years the cultivated portion of the plot had to be abandoned, and new areas of forest cleared for planting. He became yet another shifting cultivator in the Amazon rainforest. "We tried. We worked the land, bit by bit cutting down the forest. But it rained and rained and rained. The mosquitoes were insufferable. We experienced terrible suffering," he says. Used to planting maize and wheat, he had to grow instead rice and cassava. "At the beginning the rice was wonderful, but from then on it never produced the same. Now the only thing this land is good for is grass and livestock."
Andreas Chileno's problems were typically of the many thousands of people who moved into the Amazon rainforest in Bolivia, Peru and further east in Brazil in the past 40 years. Life has been hard. As each plot became exhausted, they moved on. But were soon forced to return. And each time the soils were worse, the weeds grew higher and the crops grew less well. With little cash for fertilisers and other inputs, the growing number of farmers were clearing huge areas of rainforest, leaving behind a trail of eroded soils, degraded vegetation and broken dreams. Morag Webb, a weed scientist at the NRI has been working with Barry Pound of the NRI and with Bolivian agricultural scientists and the farmers themselves in the Ichilo and Sarah provinces of Santa Cruz to try and improve farming methods. The aim has been to enable farmers to settle on fixed plots that will stay fertile, to improve their incomes, to reduce the destruction of forests and soils and to protect the region's biological diversity. A settled life would bring other benefits, allowing farmers to get better health care and put their children through school. One of the young agronomists working on the project is Emilio Chileno, son of farmer Andreas. It is, he says, a new kind of research, based on work carried out in real farmers' fields rather than at research stations. "Farmers formed a very important part of the project team," he says. They tried many systems for improving soils. They introduced cover crops and fruit trees to reduce erosion and stop the growth of weeds. They planted leguminous crops, which put nitrogen back in the soil. They alternated crops of rice and beans to improve soil fertility. Above all, the researchers encouraged farmers to diversify and try things out. Different solutions worked in different farms. To work, new cropping systems had to be good for farmers' incomes, as well as for their soils. Fruit trees such as citrus, pineapple and bananas, and timber trees such as mahogany, promise long-term income. At the close of the project 80% of farmers were adopting new methods permanently, or planned to. Typical is Vicente Flores, who says: "I liked what I saw in the experimental plot. I have looked at expanding. Our resources are limited, but I have now established three hectares of citrus in production." "At the beginning the rice was wonderful, but from then on it never produced the same. Now the only thing this land is good for is grass and livestock." -- Andreas Chileno Rocha, farmer
Slash and burn farming has a long and successful history in lightly populated rainforest areas. Provided farmers can leave the land for long enough to recover fully before returning, it does not destroy rainforest. But when migrant farmers move into the rainforest, things can be very different. They lack the skills to farm the forest successfully, and often there are too many of them to allow to forest time to recover. The result is bad for them, their soils and the forests. This project worked with farms in a small part of eastern Bolivia. But, says Morag Webb, the problems that it sought to solve are widespread and serious right across Central and South America, and beyond in parts of Africa and Asia. And the guiding principles behind the research -- such as diversity and farmer participation -- are of near-universal application.
The project on alternatives to slash and burn in Bolivia was funded by the UK Department for International Development's Crop Protection and Crop Post-Harvest Research Programmes and by the Institute for Project Planning of the German Agency for Technical Cooperation, led by staff of the NRI and collaborators in Bolivia. <back to top
In The Field is a collaboration between the BBC World Service and the Natural Resources Institute of the University of Greenwich, supported by the Rural Livelihoods Department of the UK Government Department for International Development (DFID) |
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