Peasants' Value System Concerning Mixed Cropping in the Tropical Shifting Cultivation

Recently tropical agriculturalist have come to a new understanding of the mixed cropping system, especially from the points of view of ecology. But most of researchers have not realized peasants' value system concerning mixed cropping. This paper aims at analizing the mixed cropping system in the Bakumu people in Zaire in Tropical Africa from the points of view of their sense of value towards the mixed cropping comparing with the sole cropping and their own management system of mixed cropping.According to the result of the analysis we realized that their sense of value concerning mixed cropping is concentrated on “diversity”, associating with stability on three levels as follows: 1) diversity of crops, 2) diversity of nutrition, 3) diversity conservating and maintaining their own plants and seeds.In the context of their socio-economic process, their emphasis of diversity as sense of value towards mixed cropping is strongly linked with their life style on the following two dimensions. 1) The food habit of the Bakumu people having different food day by day, time by time, being maintained through the realization of the diversity by the cropping system, 2) the system of food storage of the Bakumu people, dispersing harvesting time of their crops and stocking their crops inside the cultivated land instead of having the food storage ystem as in the temperate region.On the other hand, “diversity” as their sense of value becomes realized accompanied with fallow system being longer, according to their model of management of mixed cropping, and then we can suppose that enriching of “diversity” is closely related to their own conception of “soil productivity”.Though these analysis, we can suppose that in the Bakumu society their sense of value on mixed cropping functions not only as the sense of value on the level of the cropping technique but also as a ‘value system’ of the society as a whole

Agriculture · Agroforestry · Biology · Context (archaeology) · Cropping · Cropping system · Diversity (politics) · Geography · Sociology · Statistics · Temperate climate · Value (mathematics) · Agriculture and Rural Development Research · Ecology · Environmental Science · Mathematics · Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology

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