Date:July 12, 2010 (Mon.) 16:00 ー 18:00
Venue: Meeting Room, the 3rd floor, Inamori Foundation Memorial Hall
1. Kazuo Funahashi （Ryukoku University）
2. Juichi Itani （ASAFAS, Kyoto University）
【Acitivity Record】
Prof. Kazuo Funahashi began by giving a presentation on the development of livelihood activities in Don Daeng Village in Northeast Thailand. The area where the village is located is known for the enormous annual variability and heavy concentration of precipitation. Up until the 1960s, when there were still bountiful uncultivated areas, the people of the village secured the “good fields” as settlers, and grew a variety of crops with the aim to increase rice yields and reduce instability. However, since the 1970s, when the uncultivated lands ran out, people began to perform migrant labor in the cities to secure stable cash income. In this process, rice cultivation became increasingly oriented toward high investment/high yield, and the introduction of irrigation led to a reduction in damage from drought, though it also increased vulnerability to flooding. Not only did the values of the villagers also move away from stock (good fields) to flow (cash income), but changes were seen in inheritance customs, social security, and gender relations.
Next, Assoc. Prof. Juichi Itani, using case studies from several regions of Tanzania, gave a presentation on the use of diverse crops and cultivation methods in areas with unstable precipitation. People in those areas cope with the irregularity of rainfall by adopting a combination of crops such as maize, finger millet, and rice. A range of cultivation methods are adopted, including citemene, a form of slash-and-burn cultivation, the matengo pit method, which prevents soil erosion and makes it possible to secure natural fertilizer, and the mound method, which promotes the decomposition of organic matter. Agriculture in Africa has not undergone a linear change from traditional to modern and from extensive to intensive cultivation methods. Rather, people have tried to maintain their livelihoods by creating a variety of methods with different degrees of “intensity,” and combining them together in different ways, in response to their ecological and social situation.
In response to these presentations, there were several comments from the floor. One participant noted that the case studies cited by Assoc. Prof. Itani might be appropriately called “biosphere-inspiredbased cultivation methods,” in the sense that they represent a way of further diversifying the diversity of the biosphere, and that in contrast, the case study given by Prof. Funahashi from Don Daeng Village could be said to represent a “geosphere-inspired cultivation method,” that pursues stability. Another participant offered the comment that normally in the context of economics, it is important to make a distinction between labor intensity and land intensity, but that the intensification of traditional cultivation in Africa cannot be understood through such criteria, as it involves a process of responding to specific environmental constraints.
(Makoto Nishi)