Resource Management by West African Farmers and the Economics of Shifting Cultivation

"Shifting cultivation"-the alternation of pe-riods of cropping with relatively long periods of fallow-encompasses many indigenous agricul-tural systems, developed in a remarkable diver-sity of environments throughout the tropics. When the fallow includes woody perennials, shifting cultivation is an agroforestry practice with temporal sequencing of agricultural crops and trees. The cultural, edaphic, ecological, and agro-nomic features of shifting cultivation systems have been studied in great detail (Conklin 1957, 1963; Nye and Greenland, Unesco, de Schlippe, Allan, Fresco). It has been established that in any agroecosystem the length of the cropping period and length of fallow period are key com-ponents of long-run stability. Although the piv-otal role of labor for clearing and weeding in regulating the cycles of shifting cultivation has been repeatedly remarked (Conklin 1957, de Schlippe, Nye and Greenland, Jurion and Henry, Dabasi-Schweng), the relationship between the labor economy of shifting cultivation and the cropping and fallow cycles has been neglected. Labor is the primary input in the vast majority of west African farming systems, and clearing and weeding operations account for most agri-cultural labor in almost all cases (Baldwin;