Slash and burn in the time of climate change
Belize is getting it’s first taste of what climate change is going to look like. As of yet I have not heard of a plan to deal with inundation of low lying coastal areas, but we know that is coming. Where will those people go when the flood waters come in?
The first hit Belize has taken from climate change is heat and drought. We have had the strongest dry season I can remember, with no rain for over four months and with temperatures over 100 degrees for weeks on end. Against this backdrop we have had catastrophic fires, many attributed to the practice of slash and burn. Our farm was hit with escaped agricultural fires in May 2008, and again in May of 2024.
For millennia, Indigenous farmers in much of Central America have used a technique for the production of corn and beans involving clearing land in the dry season, burning the resulting biomass immediately before the onset of the rainy season, and planting into the ash and carbon on the soil. This is called “slash and burn”, swidden agriculture or shifting cultivation. Mixed cultivation of maize, beans and pumpkin is commonly referred to as “the Three Sisters”.
I want to be clear in two things. First that slash and burn has been used with success for many generations. Second that while the majority of the escaped fires that destroyed farms in Belize’s Toledo District in May and June 2024, numbered at at over 400 farms by the Government of Belize were agricultural in origin, others were caused by burning garbage, resulting in the loss of several homes in San Pedro Columbia, by people clearing underneath the national power lines adjacent to the highway, and by hunters who set fires to produce green grass which attract deer. Because of the increased amounts of escaped agricultural fires, aided by climate change, global warming and drought, slash and burn has become more of a problem than the solution it once was.
There are multiple reasons to do practice slash and burn. One of the most compelling reasons farmers practice slash and burn is that it removes competition from weeds, and releases phosphorous and nitrogen to the soil in a form the plants can more readily take up. A period of time after initial burning, 2–4 years, yields of annual crops go into decline, and a new area is opened for maize production.
There are multiple ways to practice slash and burn, with longer or shorter cropping episodes and longer and shorter fallow periods. They all involve clearing land, ideally having a fire management plan involving the farmers neighbours, burning the biomass before the heavy rains fall, cropping the land with maize and beans and often other species, and eventually fallowing the land to recover fertility by moving to another piece of land. The decisions on duration of cropping and fallow periods tend to be informed by land availability, land stewardship or land tenure practices, ease of access to communities and or roads, and population density. The higher the population density, especially in proximity to a community, the longer the cropping period is likely to be, and the shorter the fallow period is likely to be.
While the practice of slash and burn predates colonization, variations of this land use pattern have been widely adapted by campesino and other non-indigenous rural communities across the Americas. As a traditional land use pattern, it has worked for thousands of years.
Traditional slash and burn was a highly sophisticated land use pattern. Traditional farmers had a very high degree of literacy in soil types, weather patterns, intercropping and signs of declining and returning fertility. They paid attention to soil moisture. Farmers could read landscape health by the absence or presence of certain species. The colour of the foliage, the shape of the crown and the height of indicator tree species, such as Cahune, Cecropia peltata/trumpet tree or Schizolobium parahyba/cuam wood, Bursera simaruba/gumbo limbo Trichospermum grewifolium/macapal, Ochroma pyramidale/balsa, Guazuma ulmifolia, Bay Cedar/Pixoy and others inform farmers of the appropriateness of returning to a piece of land. If the tree is short, the crown stunted or the foliage yellow, the farmers knew that the land is not ready to return to maize production. The presence of other species such as Senna allata/“piss-a-bed”, a medicinal plant, would indicate that land was not suited for annual cultivation and should be avoided.
There are farmers who do not use fire as a tool and this is called “chop and drop”, “slash and mulch”, or locally, “mathambre”. In Mathambre the leaf litter and biomass is left to decay, retaining moisture below the leaf litter, which helps to eliminate opportunities for emergent plant species to compete with the maize. The maize, beans and pumpkin are planted into the biomass. This allows soil carbon to remain while providing food for the soil microorganisms, such as fungi, bacteria, nematodes, algae and actinomycetes which consume the decaying biomass and consume one another. This facilitates retention of soil carbon, which, in turn, helps to hold water in the landscape, and is the foundation of the healthiest soils.
Mathambre without agrochemicals or fertilizer, managed with green cover crops such as Tephrosia vogelli, Cajanua cajan/pigeon pea, Mucuna pruriens/mucuna, or Canavalia ensiformis/Canavalia can be practiced indefinitely without fallowing, but requires diligence, a degree of sophistication in land use that is largely gone, and is dependent on protracted observation and a deep knowledge base. Sadly, much of that information is dying as the dwindling number of practitioners age and agrochemicals have become the dominant paradigm.
Admittedly, a very, very small minority of mostly aged farmers practice mathambre for both wet and dry season maize production, but this is the apex of sophisticated land use for maize production and it is well within the capability of any farmer. Training in this method is traditionally done through the lateral movement of information: Farmer to farmer.
Inga alley cropping is another fire-free land management strategy that is used in maize production. In 2011, we introduced the first inga alley cropping system to Belize. Inga alley cropping is a way to replicate the cycle of establishment, growth, harvest, fallow and succession of the traditional shifting cultivation cycle. It is designed to be used in three year cycles using trees of the Inga genus, with three cropping areas and one year cropping regimes and two year fallow periods. A brief graphic below shows flows in time. We trained Ya’axche Conservation Trust in this technique and they have done a lot of outreach targeting communities and getting community buy in. A manual we coauthored based on the work done at Maya Mountain Research Farm can be found, here.
Inga Alley Cropping is a short sustainable rotational cycle, using managed succession for the repair of degraded land, production of maize and the provision of fuel wood. A fallow rotational cycle can be shortened from 7–9 years to a 3 year rotational cycle. Inga alley cropping creates fertility, boosting corn production and providing fuel wood, which is important in Maya households.
The main barriers to implementation of inga alley cropping tends to be an issue of time to establish the Inga trees, and access to seeds.
During the inga alley cropping training and nursery establishment we emphasise that farmers should divert a number of their trees, at least 50, to nurseries for later access to more seed. The second barrier to the implementation of inga alley cropping is access to information, training and education in proper management. An example of this is farmers who burn the leaves below the inga tree rows after pollarding, negating the value of the leaf litter and damaging the soil biota. At no point is fire or herbicide needed once an inga alley cropping system is established.
Inga alley cropping is perhaps the most accessible alternative to slash and burn and is in many ways easier to implement and manage than mathambre with green cover crops.
Regardless of how slash and burn is practiced, with or without the Three Sisters, the cycle of clearing and planting on a single location can be done for two to five years before the Energy Returned On Energy Invested (EROEI) ratio begins to decline, at which point the farmer either transitions to other forms of agriculture, for example banana, cassava, cocoyam, sweet potato, avocado, or mixed agroforestry with many other potential species, or move to a second piece of land to clear for maize and bean and fallows the land, allowing it to recuperate. Traditionally and sustainably, land is fallowed for 3–9 years, and the window of active maize and beans production is 2–4 years.
This degree of sophistication in traditional slash and burn was at the community level. Decisions about burning, for example, were done by something akin to group consensus, and as a result, the loss of control of fires seldom happened. One farmer would ask perhaps 10 farmers to assist them in the clearing, burning planting or harvesting their crops, and in turn, would return that day to each farmer. Maybe the labour returned would be to thatch a house, to plant, or haul a log to make a dory, or it might be in clearing and cleaning the maize crop.
All of this supported the decision making process that helped to avoid escaped fires. If one farmer had 7 people there to help them and five said “This is not a good day to burn”, there would be no burning. In the absence of shared labour exchange, substituted for labour in exchange for cash, decisions may be made based on financial considerations that can result in the catastrophic fires we saw this year.
As Maya communities have become more financially integrated with the currency based economy of the rest of Belize, with men and, to a lesser extent, women leaving their villages to “job out” as teachers, police officers, in the Belize Defence Force, as nurses, domestics, in the banana or citrus industry, as tour guides, or other forms of out of village paid labour, the tradition of labour exchange and the lateral movement of information has decreased.
In the 1980s, very few farmers in southern Belize used herbicides or fertilizers. When I managed the Toledo Cacao Growers Association in the 1990s and early 2000s, the first organic and fairtrade certified cacao producers in the world, few farmers used chemicals and most of the board of directors at TCGA considered the farmers who did use herbicides to be stupid and lazy. Not a judgement, just an observation.
In 2022, we interviewed dozens of farmers close to the border with Guatemala and did not find a single farmer who did not use herbicides at least once in their maize cropping regime. Several farmers used five or six applications of different herbicides, some, like 2,4,D, which are tightly controlled in the nations that make them, but available to anyone with the the money to buy it and a freely granted “pesticide applicators license”. There is very little understanding of the dangers of these substances, with farmers being told “If used as proscribed, these chemicals are safe”. If the threshold between safe and not safe is… cancer, these chemicals are not safe.
Use of these chemicals results in fragile models of production that are more susceptible to weeds, insects, bacterial and fungal infestations, and create fire susceptible landscapes. This represents a form of long term cultural erosion and a drain from the economies of the communities that have become dependent on them.
The paradigm has changed from millennia of Indigenous practices, locally appropriate and informed by observation and tradition, passed on through familial and lateral relationships and informed observation on site, to top down “training” that converts money into poison into food, and siphons money from Indigenous farmers and sends it to the board rooms of companies far removed from the places these products are used. Millennia of accumulated Indigenous knowledge in land use has been discarded in less than 30 years. The sophisticated management of land for fertility has been substituted with buying fertilizer.
Weed control by machete, which involved observation and care, allowed space for non target species, has been replaced with Round Up, 2,4,D, Gramaxone and other herbicides, where non target species of cultural, culinary or medicinal value are largely absent because in the reductionist logic inherent in input dependent maize production, they no longer have value.
In years past in every milpa field one would encounter “monte”, or species that emerge in traditional maize fields. Medicinal crops such as Momordica charantia/sorosi were common. Traditional foods like Solanum nigrum/i’cha, used as an egg extender for cooking eggs for a large family were common, and this still has some market value. Physalis philadelphica, or Physalis ixocarpa, both called tomatillo, are other species of culinary and economic value that were common in maize fields. They are largely gone.
Melothria pendula, syn. Melothria guadalupensis and Melothria scabra known as creeping cucumber, cucamelon, Mexican miniature watermelon are species of wild cucurbits that occur in Belize. They have some cultural and culinary value. In Q’eqchi Mayan the melothrias are known as“santi icho”. M. pendula is native from the North American southeast down to South America. M. glabra is native from Mexico to Panama and Central America and the Caribbean. All of these species are absent in milpa farms that have multiple applications of herbicides per crop. In addition to their culinary and cultural values, they are indicator species of soil health. Maize fields that do not have these and the previously identified species do not have healthy soils.
Medicinal and culinary plants such as Ocimum basilicum are often encouraged in mathambre systems, and are generally absent in agrochemical dependent maize fields.
In much of Mesoamerica, we are having longer, harder dry seasons, and shorter, milder rainy seasons. This has resulted in escaped fires damaging neighbouring farms. Early successional forest that comes after fire is more fire susceptible than older forests. Burning erases soil biota. Land that has been “cleaned” with herbicide is more fire prone. This is especially relevant in dry years where escaped milpa fires go large distances and damage other peoples farms. If the first rain following burning is hard, a lot of the phosphorous may run off.
While clearing using machete and fire is practiced in some form in all of the communities, in some communities, the primary mechanism for weed removal and management has become the use of herbicides, or lighting a fire to clear an area without chopping it, first. This is a nontraditional practice that is mis-identified as “traditional land use”.
Within the last 30 years, traditional maize and beans production techniques have largely been discarded in favour of the seductive reductionist logic of chemical and fertilizer input models. This has resulted in the shortening or elimination of traditionally observed fallow periods that allow soil fertility to return. While most farmers using herbicides and fertilizer identify themselves as fallowing their land, we observe either very short fallow rotational cycles or the absence of any fallow period, with the use of synthetic fertilizers to maintain nitrogen levels. This has been a contributing factor to the long term decline in healthy soil biota and fertility resulting in a collapse of production, and increase in fire prone landscapes and escaped fires.
There are presently several arguments being made:
1. One argument is that slash and burn is traditional land use and cannot be infringed upon by the government. This is held by some community members and references the long tradition of successful traditional fire management. However, much of the other aspects of this long held tradition are gone. Labour exchange is decreased. Observation and accepting feedback from indicator species is replaced with applying imported herbicides and fertilizers. The slash and burn being practiced now has lost much of both the traditional cultural practices built around community and agronomic practices built around biodiversity that made it sustainable for millennia. The only “traditional” aspect of this simplified slash and burn left is the fire. That cannot be considered traditional.
I am fully in favour of the right of self determination. While I consider fire as a tool to have more negative consequences to land health than positive results, even before we consider the risk of damage caused by escaped fires, slash and burn can be and was practiced sustainably for millennia. Self determination ends when fires damage other peoples farms. Slash and burn has been managed on the community level with the input of the Alcalde and later on after the enactment of the Village Council Act, with the support of the village council. However, enforcement at the community level is now basically non-existent.
What we are seeing now is that with the effects of climate change, months with no rain, and high temperatures, that peoples decision making process is resulting in fires leaving the confines of their cultivated areas and damaging their neighbours farms. People are making predictably bad decisions, and walking away. They will still plant their maize, but their neighbours will lose many years of work. There are zero consequences for these fires to the people who lit them.
The vast majority of the farms damaged by these recent escaped agricultural fires belong to Maya farmers, especially farmers investing in long term land improvement through crops such as avocado, breadfruit, mango, cacao, coffee, coconut, cardamom, and vanilla.
2. The other argument is that slash and burn needs to be curtailed, controlled, banned or a moratorium placed on the use of fire during certain times of the year. This argument tends to be made by farmers who grow long term crops, especially cacao, timber species, coffee and coconuts. The fires of May and June cost millions of dollars of future lost potential income, and the loss of years of careful management and investment. Both the people lighting agricultural fires and the people with damaged permanent crops are in the same communities.
I managed the Toledo Cacao Growers Association in Punta Gorda in the 1990s and early 2000s. When I started we had 225 Mopan and Q’eqchi Maya cacao farmers. When I left we had over 750 farmers. Most years a farm or two would be destroyed by an escaped fire. Some years we would not see any farms damaged by fire. For a farmer to invest 4–6 years of work before their first harvest, and have their work erased by an escaped fire from a neighbour is a tragedy, and a serious impediment to long term investments in improvements to landscapes by incorporating perennial crops and high value marketable crops.
In May and June of 2024, Toledo District saw over 400 farms damaged or destroyed by fire in 28 communities, the majority of which were Maya communities with a tradition of slash and burn. At least 10 houses were destroyed. An estimated 6,000 acres of farmland were damaged in Toledo. I am not even considering the damage in other districts of the country, which is considerable. The damage to the Forest Reserves in Belize is still being tabulated but it is in the tens of thousands of acres. This catastrophic loss of peoples livelihoods and to the environment was frustratingly predictable and avoidable. Climate change is here. People did not adjust their land use to reflect the world we now live in.
Celini and I made a conscious decision not to make biochar, the pyrolizing of biomass to make a non-labile form of carbon that functions as a soil amendment, creates habitat for soil biota, and sequesters carbon for hundreds of years, because while we considered we could almost certainly control the fire, the very small risk of an escaped fire existed. We felt even the minimal risk with our management plan and years of experience was too high. We were not willing to take that risk to our farm and to our neighbours farms.
This year, anyone who lit a fire, ANYONE, either to burn garbage or biomass close to the house, to clear for maize production or pasture establishment, or to clear under the power lines or to attract deer in the savannah, made a conscious decision that their desired outcome was worth more than their neighbours farms and houses.
Four traditional industries in Belize that are the most resistant to change are:
a) Forestry
b) Fisheries
c) Hunting
d) Agriculture
Of these four traditional industries, laws have been enacted governing Forestry, Fisheries and Hunting. Those laws are strict and are prosecuted, often with very heavy fines and/or jail time. Because of that, the laws regarding Forestry, Fisheries and Hunting are respected.
Forestry has created laws that are prosecuted for the harvest of wood to guarantee access to timber in the future, with set times for harvests, minimum size and taxes imposed, and fines for violation of the law. One can sometimes see confiscated lumber at the Forestry Station on the San Antonio Road.
Belize’s Marine Protected Area (MPA) system is one of the most well managed fisheries systems in the world, an absolutely stellar model of what can be done if there is both political will, solid top down management and bottom up community buy in through outreach, stakeholder engagement and education. I have had the privilege to work in almost all of Belize’s MPA’s as a photovoltaic technician. There are set areas for fishing, and dates for access to certain species, set areas with no catch allowed, with the concept of “catch certainty” being baked into the laws. Woe unto anyone caught with undersize lobster and conch out of season. The fines can be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Through this catch certainty is assured for the future.
Hunting has set seasons for gibnut, peccary, deer and other mammals, as well as for birds and reptiles. There are heavy fines attached to violations of hunting law. Violating those laws and getting caught will cost someone a lot of money and potentially their freedom. These laws are spottily enforced reflecting the amount of enforcement officers on the ground, but the laws exist and are prosecuted.
Agriculture has its own fires law, the AGRICULTURAL FIRES ACT, which can be found, here. There is another law, FIRE (NEGLIGENT USE OF) ACT CHAPTER 117, which explains the use of fire passes, that can be found, here. The Agricultural Fires Act which governs agricultural fires has never been enforced to my knowledge. This is a well crafted set of legislation, succinct, unambiguous, originally written in 1958. It was apparently last updated in 2011. In my 35+ years of farming, I have NEVER seen anyone prosecuted for burning without a permit, or heard of anyone ever applying for a permit to burn. Not once. I have never seen anyone held accountable for damage to another farmers land from an escaped fire, not criminally or civilly. The penalties, themselves, are fairly anaemic:
“8. Every person who,
(a) sets fire on, or procures, or aids the setting fire on any land without a licence; or
(b) clears, procures, aids the clearing of, any land in contravention of section 7 of this Act, commits an offence and is liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding five hundred dollars or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months, or to both such fine and term of imprisonment.”
As we look to the future, we need to understand that climate change is not some event in the future, it is a process that is underway, already. We as a nation need to find a balance between farmers rights to different agricultural techniques, including the use of fire within the law, and the collective responsibility to protect our neighbours lands, houses and livelihoods. We also need to understand that the present form of slash and burns only commonality with “traditional slash and burn” is the fire aspect. The rest of it, the sophisticated cultural and agronomic aspects that constitute traditional slash and burn, are mostly gone.
Perhaps avoiding the destruction of over 400 farms in Toledo every year can be done like the way MPAs are managed, with seasons for burning, or with a national department that looks at factors such as soil humidity, lack of rain, heat and wind and makes decisions on wether or not fires are permitted. That would be a top down management strategy that could use the existing agricultural fires act with penalties from the Government of Belize. There would need to be rigorous enforcement of the law to make any significant change. Presently the law and its complete and utter lack of enforcement is not a significant deterrent. The financial penalties should be increased, and the potential period of imprisonment should be increased. As the law stands now, there is little deterrence.
To make a national fire management plan work there would also need to be bottom up advocacy and management enacted at the community level and managed by the community members, the Alcalde and/or the village councils. This will require education, outreach and community buy in. It will require effective self government from people who are capable of doing the jobs their communities gave them, which is not always the case.
Clearly what we happened this year is not sustainable. Until there is a community buy in to avoid escaped fires, unless there is a framework that manages fires, until the existing Agricultural Fires Act is enhanced, enforced, with fines, imprisonment and civil liability, this will happen again and again.
This cannot happen again. Something has to change.
