Sustainable land use in Tikopia: Foodproduction and consumption in an isolatedagricultural system

摘要

The land use system on Tikopia – a Polynesian outlier in Solomon Islands – is analyzed to determinehow it has developed since it was first described in the 1930s and again in the 1970s. Fieldworkincluded a household questionnaire survey, in-depth interviews on farming practices and decisionmaking, and the collection of soil samples from the major soil and garden types. The Tikopian landuse system has not undergone significant changes since the 1970s; indeed the focus on self-sufficiency in food crops may have been strengthened over the past 30 years as ship arrivals havebecome increasingly unreliable. Local agricultural production and exploitation of marine resourcesare essential to sustain the population, and with few exceptions farming and fishing techniquesremain unchanged. Most of the island is still farmed permanently and the intensive agriculturalsystem has not suffered long-term setbacks, not even from extreme events such as Cyclone Zoe in2002. The high fertility of Tikopian soils reported in the 1960s was found to be unchanged. It isconcluded that the land use system is highly resilient to shocks and that there are no indicationsthat Tikopian villagers would not be able to support their subsistence in the future, provided thereis no substantial increase in the resident (de facto) population.