Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Sustainability of Miskito Slash-and-Burn Agriculture in the Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve of the Mosquitia Rain Forest Corridor, Honduras

University Of Kansas Center For Research Inc, Lawrence KS

Investigators

Abstract

One response to the growing world-wide attention to environmental issues has been the establishment of an international network of biosphere reserves, which have been established to protect areas of high biological and cultural diversity. A special challenge of managing these reserves is determining how to preserve the natural ecological characteristics of places at the same time opportunities are provided for indigenous peoples residing in and near the reserves to engage in traditional and new forms of sustainable economic activity. Analysis of the interrelationships between indigenous resource use and protected-area management is crucial to assessing the long-term viability of conservation initiatives in these locales. This doctoral dissertation research will analyze the sustainability of indigenous Miskito slash-and-burn agriculture within the context of proposed conservation management guidelines for the Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve of eastern Honduras. The project will focus on the land-use practices of Wampusirpi, an indigenous Miskito community along the southeastern boundary of the reserve. For the purposes of this project, sustainability is defined as the length of time that agriculture in the reserve will be able to supply village subsistence and cash needs given current forest clearance, population growth, and the proposed biosphere land-use restrictions. Participant observation and other ethnographic research techniques will be used to collect socioeconomic, demographic, and agricultural data from each household in the community. These data will be used to construct a predictive model that simulates future population growth and land-use expansion for the community, thereby facilitating an assessment of the sustainability of slash-and-burn agriculture in the biosphere. The project will document current land-use patterns of an indigenous Miskito community in Rio Platano, and it will provide a range of possible scenarios for future land-use practices, thereby identifying the pressures that subsistence and economic needs of biosphere residents might place on management of the reserve in the future. By analyzing the sustainability of agriculture within the context of the Rio Platano management plan, this project will contribute to current debates on the role of indigenous people in conservation and the viability of protected areas as models to conserve biological diversity and provide for indigenous land and resource rights. Project results therefore will valuable for the formulation of future conservation policy in Rio Platano and other inhabited protected areas in Latin America. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.