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Description
Introduction
Determination of the sustainability of shifting cultivation systems has been of frequent interest to cultural geographers and anthropologists, and calculations of human carrying capacity have often been used to estimate sustainability. But as William Allen points out, the carrying capacity concept is "by no means self-explanatory, it can be understood and defined only in relation to environments and systems of land use" (Allen 1965:8-9). Many research contributions toward measuring environmental carrying capacity have been developed: Conklin (1957), Loftier (1960), Carneiro (1960), Rappaport (1968), Street (1969), Feachem (1973), Brush (1975), Kalland (1976), Grossman (1984), Ohtsuka (1994), Gilruth et al. (1995), and Gleave (1996). Each of these studies contribute a wealth of understanding to the conceptualization and the determination of environmental carrying capacity and include insights on cropping and fallow periods, variation in cropping pattern, crop choices, infusion of new crops, human nutrition, changing technology, land degradation, and soil erosion.
This study was conducted in the Bitoi River Delta of the Kamiali Wildilfe Management Area in Papua New Guinea. It is designed to provide useful information to the managers of the Kamiali Wildlife Management Area rather than to carry out a comprehensive evaluation of previous academic research on carrying capacity. We adopt a standard approach to calculating carrying capacity (Carneiro 1960, Rappaport 1968, Wagner 2002:251-252) and use a sample field study to measure and estimate the amount of farmland necessary to support the local population at this moment in time. This, combined with average forest fallow time, serves as an indicator of a local community's agricultural land needs with respect to its population.
Background
Kamiali Village is a community of swidden horticulturists and fishers lying 80 kilometers in a south-southeasterly direction along the coast from the City of Lae, Papua New Guinea (PNG) (Figure 1). In their own language, villagers also refer to their community as "Kamu Yali." The term "Kamiali" originated as a variant spelling of Kamu Yali when the wildlife management area was first set up. To make things even more confusing, the community is still officially identified on maps and in government records as Lababia, the name assigned to it a century ago by colonial officials.
Villagers use only about 5% of their total land area of 200 square miles for horticulture with the remainder constituting a relatively undisturbed rainforest environment that stretches from sea level to above 2000 meters in elevation. By the early and mid-1990s, several foreign-owned logging companies were intensifying their activities in the coastal forests of PNG, including this region of Morobe Province (Filer 1997). Much destruction took place, and many communities were environmentally traumatized by the actions of Malaysian logging companies in particular. One of the few communities that did not buy into the "get rich" logging proposal was Kamiali Village (Bein et al. 1998; Bein 1999, 2004; Wagner 2002, 2005).
The Kamiali Wildlife Management Area (KWMA) was set up as part of an Integrated Conservation and Development Project implemented in 1995 by Village Development Trust (VDT), an environmental non-governmental organization (NGO) based in the City of Lae. Although the conservation and development project is now defunct, VDT continues to... |
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