CS.3.8.1 Describe el territorio del Ecuador, sus características

professional bias. As it is assumed that the processes involved are simple and generally understood, research tend to remain ad hoc, hurried and biased, and thereby confirm the findings of earlier research. This may perhaps account for an historical lag in the discussion of conditions in the uplands, noted earlier in this chapter.

Some authors (Wiersum, 1980; Pake, 1989) present a more elaborate view on the farmers' attitude in land management by combining a lack of willingness among farmers to practise proper land management with a lack of capacity to do so. Their argument is as follows: since farmers lack sufficient resources for the upkeep of soil fertility, they are not prepared to improve their ways of farming, particularly if they have access to alternative forms of employment which further distract their attention from proper soil conservation. Consequently, a vicious cycle emerges: low yields prevent farmers from purchasing off-farm fertilizer. Farmers will therefore refrain from putting more effort into soil conservation measures. Hence, they will continue to have low yields.

There seems to be some historical evidence for this view. Joosten (1941) and de Haan (1951; both quoted in Wiersum, 1980), for instance, reported that soil conservation measures in West Java were adopted much more readily in areas with volcanic soils than in areas with marly soils. This may have been because temperate vegetable cropping systems practised on volcanic soils in the highlands offered the opportunities for commercial cropping which gave farmers higher output value and allowed them to purchase off-farm inputs. This view is superior to the previous two, as it presents a model which incorporates both lack of resources and farmers' perceptions into one model which tries to explain the problem in terms of a process. The two components of this view are of course subject to similar criticisms as the previous views. Moreover, in posing the problem as a vicious circle, the model rules out the possibility of any improvement whatsoever coming from within the farming system.

The views discussed are shown as a cross-table (Table 2.3) ordered by efforts in soil conservation and yield prospects. The first view, which is not primarily concerned with soil conservation, could not be included. The box in the upper right comer presents a hypothetical situation which is not represented in the hterature. Yet one would expect such a situation under extreme population pressure, causing people without alternative sources of income to put great efforts into soil conservation, irrespective of yield expectations.

38

Table 2 3 Schematized attitudes in land management in upland areas in Java

Efforts in soil conservation much little high Yield expectations neutral low 4 5

profitable crops; hypothesized:

opportunities for as 3, but people largely dependent on land buying off-farm inputs subsistence crops

highland vegetables

1 2 3

land abundant; _{prime concern marginal land} long fallows possible for subsistence needs; little scope for

shifting short term buying off-farm inputs

cultivation considerations subsistence crops

prevail

subsistence crops

In the literature no mention is made of another possibly important factor in the process of land degradation under upland farming. When compared with wet-rice cultivation, yields in upland farming are much more capricious due to irregular rainfall, pests and diseases. It is therefore surprising that nowhere in the literature on upland degradation in Java are yield fluctuations due to bio-climatological disturbances accorded any role in the process of land degradation. These fluctuations may cause great losses to upland farmers, and the set-backs may deprive farmers of the resources they need to carry out proper land management and thereby set into motion or exacerbate the process of degradation.

2.5 Unequal access to resources and inter-household relationships

In the literature on upland farming, the rural population is often regarded as a homogeneous mass. Differences between households are disregarded; social relations between households are also not considered. It is true that, in the uplands, landlessness is often vinually absent and land distribution is usually not as skewed as in the lowland areas, where agriculture is more commercialized and where more opponunities exist for non-agricultural employment. However, the range in the quality of land, varying from irrigable and fertile valley bottoms to bare and rocky hillslopes, is often much wider than in the lowlands and the inequality in distribution of high quality land can be much

less access to resources or only with access to low quality resources can be expected to demand the most of their resources (Blaikie, 1981). A number of studies have noted that differences in access to land between households have caused differences in land use. Households with large holdings devoted larger portions of their dry-cultivated fields to perennial crop cultivation, which is ecologically more sustainable than annual crop cultivation. Small farmers, on the other hand, were not able to do so because they needed all their land to grow annual food crops to meet their family consumption needs and thereby made greater demands on their land (Hunink and Stoffers, 1984: 114; van der Poel et ai, 1985: 15; Berenschot, 1986: 66)20. However, the greater production pressures with which small farmers are confronted may at the same time work as a greater incentive for them to utihze their resources prudently. In two village studies in central Java it was found that households with holdings smaller than 0.5 ha used much higher inputs of stable manure, inorganic fertilizer and labour and achieved much greater yields than households with more than 0.5 ha (van der Poel et ai, 1985: 17). The fact that small farmers have often started to terrace their land well before large farmers, as was mentioned in the previous section, also points this out clearly. Land management on small holdings may therefore not necessarily lead to further degradation. It all depends on how much room for manoeuvre farmers have.

In the lowlands, many households gain access to land as tenants or share-croppers, which gives them the right to cultivate the land for a limited period only. In the uplands the lack of security involved in these arrangements might deter cultivators from practising proper land management, as they cannot be sure that they would reap the benefits of their labour. However, tenancy and share cropping seem to be rare phenomena in subsistence-oriented upland areas (Palte, 1989).

The fate of small farmers who are short of land and/or other resources depends on whether or not they have access to alternative resources close at hand, such as common grazing grounds, opportunities to cultivate extra land, such as plots allotted to local people in reforestation schemes on nearby forest land, or land from fellow villagers, and, on what conditions they can cultivate this land. Thus, the social relations which households with few resources maintain with households with more resources, village

20. However, this type of differentiation may be absent under different circumstances. In an area in East