Agricultural Systems of the Northeastern Hill Region of India

Abstract

Agriculture is the predominant activity of a large majority of the world population. Industrialization of agriculture through large fuel energy subsidies, sophisticated chemical control of pests and diseases, and high-yielding crop varieties has resulted in huge increases in agricultural yields during the last half century. Such agricultural systems are efficient in terms of human time and labor but suffer from many deficiencies. They are highly inefficient from an overall energetic point of view, because five to ten units of fuel energy are required to produce a single unit of food energy (Steinhart and Steinhart, 1974). Apart from the ecological instability of the monoculture of a single high-yielding crop variety, industrialized agriculture also causes varied environmental problems related to the intensive use of fossil-based chemicals. The obvious inapplicability of such systems as models for development in an energy-limited world has led to renewed scientific interest in traditional systems of agriculture, which presumably offer ecological efficiency. In particular, shifting or swidden systems of cultivation have been held up as models of productive efficiencies where five to fifty units of food energy are obtained for each unit of energy expended (Rappaport, 1971; Steinhart and Steinhart, 1974). The possibility for increased crop production has been suggested (Greenland, 1975; Revelle, 1976; Mutsaers et al., 1981), without departing too much from the traditional system of shifting agriculture that has been considered as the most evolved system for the forested areas of the tropics and subtropics (Nye and Greenland, 1960; Walters, 1971).