Question

Explain why European foresters regarded the practice of shifting cultivation as harmful to the forests.

Answer 1

Hint
Shifting cultivation is an agricultural method in which a person uses a piece of land, just a short time later to abandon or change the initial use. This method also involves clearing a piece of land before the soil loses fertility, followed by several years of wood harvesting or farming.

Complete answer:
(i) European foresters need forests for the production of timber. They felt that land used every couple of years for shifting cultivation could not grow trees for railway timber.

(ii) There was an additional chance of fire spreading and destroying valuable wood when the forest was burned.

(iii) Shifting cultivation has also made the measurement of taxes complicated for the government. The government agreed, therefore to forbid shifting cultivation. As a result, many people in the woods have been forcefully expelled from their homes.

Additional Information:
When the soil shows signs of fatigue or more generally, when the field is overrun by weeds, the cultivation cycle for shifting cultivation is usually terminated. Typically, the amount of time a field is cultivated is less than the period during which the soil is allowed to regenerate by lying fallow. In LEDCs (less economically developed countries) or LICs, this technique is also used (Low-Income Countries). In some areas, as one aspect of their farming cycle, growers use a slash-and-burn process. Others use land clearing without any burning, and some growers are simply migratory and on a given plot do not use any cyclical process. Often where regrowth is solely made of grasses, no slashing at all is needed, an outcome not unusual when soils are near exhaustion and need to lie fallow. After two or three years of growing vegetable and grain crops on cleared land as agriculture changes, migrants abandon it for another plot. The land is also cleared by methods of slash-and-burn-trees, woods and bushes are cleared by hacking, and the remaining vegetation is burned. The ashes introduce potash to the soil. The seeds are then sown in the rain.

Note
Shifting cultivation is an agricultural method in which plots of land are temporarily cultivated, then abandoned while fallow vegetation is permitted to grow freely after disturbance while the cultivator moves on to another plot. An overview of the role of government and local institutions in regulating shifting cultivation over time has been defined in a book called Shifting cultivation policies: Balancing environmental and social sustainability (2017).