Agricultural Intensification

Uma cultivation in prewar Buguias deviated most markedly from "classical swidden" in its short fallow and in its labor intensiveness.^[6] Following Ester Boserup's (1965) powerful theory of agricul-

tural intensification, one would expect precisely such developments if Buguias agriculture were responding to population pressure. With more persons deriving sustenance from the same area, fallow periods would have been progressively shortened as labor inputs were progressively increased. Demographic history, however, is difficult to establish; during the pre-American period the population of Buguias no doubt fluctuated wildly in response to epidemics, military incursions, and migrations. But during the years of American power, population did mount steadily. American and Philippine census data, although of dubious quality, reflect such growth, the recorded population of the Buguias municipal district rising from 1,612 in 1901, to 5,894 in 1948—the latter figure tabulated after the wartime devastation.^[7]

But in many respects, the degree of intensivity exhibited in prewar Buguias agriculture is better explained by ecological than by demographic factors. Since rice would not mature if grown during the wet season, irrigated terraces were necessary for this crop. Once constructed, pond fields do not require a rejuvenating fallow. The motivation for building them, however, rested as much in the ideational as in the material sphere; rice was grown more for the prestigious intoxicant that it provided than for the calories it might afford. Dry fields, however, were allowed only a short fallow, not for lack of land but rather because of the environmental requirements of the staple crop.^[8] Sweet-potato vines would produce the whole year only on sites endowed with deep moisture-retentive soils. True, the Buguias people could have grown all of their tubers in the wet season, storing enough to last the year. But storage would have demanded its own heavy labor burdens, just as it would have resulted in a less appetizing diet. Moreover, the existence of a separate pastoral sector militated against frequent field relocation; for pastureland to be recultivated, the sod had to be manually turned, an extremely laborious undertaking.

Continued population expansion under the prewar regime would have brought systematic agricultural changes. More careful management could have increased the rice yield, and the pond fields themselves could have been drained and planted to sweet potatoes in the off-season. Dry fields could have been intensified by eliminating their vestigial fallow. But increasing the sweet-potato harvest significantly would have required manuring, a labor-

demanding task that also would have stinted the fertile and easily managed door-yard gardens.

A less revolutionary method of increasing production would have been simply to expand the more productive sectors. Additional pastureland could have been converted to dry fields and terraces, while distant woodlands and brushlands could have been cleared for cattle grazing. But since land was finite, constrained ultimately by intervillage boundaries, increased production in this manner would have brought intersectoral spatial competition. Prime dry fields might have been transformed to pond fields, thus forcing new uma construction in previously marginal sites. Pasturelands, cane breaks, brushlands, and forests, however, would have gradually but steadily diminished. Indeed, much evidence suggests that these were precisely the kinds of changes that were occurring in the American period.

If the diet of the Buguias people had continued to be based largely on local subsistence, and had the population continued to grow, labor burdens would have increased, while dietary quality would have diminished. A shrinking pastoral sector would have supported fewer cattle, which would have been divided among more persons. Meanwhile, ever-increasing applications of labor would have been required to convert ever more marginal areas into arable fields or to intensify the output of existing plots.

Beyond this, the potential evolutionary pathways of the intensifying subsistence system are unknowable. As elsewhere, in prewar Buguias a range of potential choices existed, and any developments would have depended on human decisions and innovations. We need only to look at two neighboring peoples, the central Ifugao and the Bontoc, both of whom had much higher population densities in the prewar period than did the Buguias people. The Bontocs had integrated their expansive pond-field system with their dry fields; off-season terraces were drained, ridged, and planted to sweet potatoes (Jenks 1905). Much work was expended, especially since terraces were also manured, but the resulting fields were productive: in 1948, 1,000 hectares of cultivated land in the Buguias regions (reportedly) supported some 9,267 persons, while in Bontoc the figure was 20,966 (Republic of the Philippines 1954, Part 1:53—such figures are, of course, of suspect reliability). In Ifugao, the even more expansive pond fields were seasonally fallowed as in

Buguias, while nonterraced areas were either devoted to brush-fallow swidden or to intensively managed woodlot orchards (see Conklin 1980). Both of these intensified systems were probably sustainable, but neither allowed the meat consumption that was possible in Buguias.

The argument presented above is not merely an exercise in hypothetical reasoning; its purpose is rather cautionary. The latter part of this work will turn to the commercial agriculture that replaced the dry-field/pond-field/pastureland complex following World War II. I will argue that the new agricultural system represents an ecological debacle, marked by eroded hillslopes, denuded canyons, poisoned watersheds, and exterminated wildlife. But we should not allow the desolation of the modern regime to lead us into regarding the prewar period as an ecological idyll. Certainly subsistence agriculture was relatively sustainable, but with increasing population density, environmental degradation would have resulted nonetheless. Cultural ecologists have shown in many instances the utility of viewing "pre-modern" societies as adapted to their environments, but prewar Buguias shows powerfully that they should also be seen, in the tradition of cultural geography, as remaking their very landscapes—and not necessarily in a positive manner (see the essays in Thomas [1956], and, more recently, Blaikie and Brookfield [1987]).

In continually refashioning their landscape, the people of Buguias were both constrained and enabled by their natural environment. But their environmental-management decisions were also made within a limiting social milieu—within a preexisting (although constantly changing) system of power relations and social ideology. As human society changed, so too changed the relationship between people and nature.