UWEC geography 111 Vogeler

	Central America: Milpa *Farmers are planting corn and squash in a milpa, Spanish for field.* Why are Third World agriculturalists usually called peasants but First World ones are called farmers? What names are given to this type of farming? What are the white areas on the ground? What is the name of the tool that the man is holding? What crops are being planted?
Answers: ethnocentricity: the dominant culture rates itself superior to that of other cultures names: shifting agriculture, swidden, or slash and burn white areas: tree trunks are completely burned, whereas the rest of the vegetation burned to leave charcoal which neutralizes the acidic soil allowing crops to grow better technology: digging stick crops: corn, squash, peppers, etc. -- some fields contain 10 or more different crops! Corn is the world's second most important food, after rice. Corn plants grow 11 cm. (4.3 inches) or more a day, which explains why Midwest farmers say they can hear corn grow!
In another part of the world: About 30% of the cultivated land of Southeast Asia is used for swidden ('shifting' or 'slash and burn') cultivation. Ethnic groups practicing this form of agriculture account for about 10% of the region's population. Swidden cultivation involves a temporary modification of the environment. Because very long periods of fallow are required after a piece of land is farmed by slash and burn techniques to allow regeneration of forest, this practice necessitates large land areas and low population densities. Therefore, unlike peasant agriculture which uses permanent fields and is intensive, swidden cultivation is extensive - i.e. requiring a large ratio of land to population supported and amount of food produced.
Landless farmers throughout the tropics use shifting agriculture to grow food for themselves and for the market. Often they lack access and ownership in other parts of their countries because of extreme landownership concentration. For example, in 1991, 58,000 Brazilian landowners owned 50 percent of the 3 million land holdings. In other words, a very few large farm owners controlled almost all of the rural land in Brazil. Under such conditions, farmers with inadequate land and landless workers seek out land in the Amazon basin of Brazil, where they practice shifting cultivation and, eventually, plow cultivation or ranching which eventually leads to environmental problems of soil erosion and destruction of the complex tropical rainforest.

Created by Ingolf Vogeler on 1 February 1996; last revised on 07 March 2005.

Central America: Milpa