The systems of land use and rights in the Karen communities described by Kunstadter (1978), Hinton (1975) and Madha (1980) all share certain common features. The most important are fallow cycles, ranging from four to ten years (or slightly more), which are closely observed, and usufructuary rights to swiddens and fallow swiddens which are inalienable and inheritable but which may be voluntarily transferred from an owner (or household head) to another household by surrendering the rights, or by sale. Both these features are essentially mechanisms which regulate access to forest resources for swiddening purposes in conditions which are characterised by ecological deterioration as a result of population increases.

In Palokhi, however, neither of these features exist as part of a system of land use and rights regulating access to forests and swidden land. Because of the generally stable ecological conditions in the Huai Thung Choa valley and the relative abundance of forests, there are few, if any, ecological constraints which would demand some form of regulation of access to resources. Furthermore, although the population of Palokhi has increased steadily since the founding of the settlement, population growth has yet to reach a level where the resources of the Huai Thung Choa valley would be inadequate for the swiddening needs of the Palokhi Karen. Another reason why ecological conditions have tended to remain favourable and, indeed, improve over the last ten years (Prayad and Chapman [1983]), is because the Palokhi Karen have diversified their resource base by taking up wet-rice cultivation thus reducing pressure on the forests of the Huai Thung Choa valley as a resource for swidden cultivation. All these factors explain the absence of institutionalised regulation of access to land for swiddening in the form of a thorough-going system of land use and rights in Palokhi. I might add, however, that the Palokhi Karen are not altogether unfamiliar with land use-rights systems having themselves migrated to Palokhi from areas where there were shortages of swiddening land, as I noted in Chapter II.

Swidden sites are selected freely by individual households — except when, of course, households may have decided to swidden a particular area without knowing that some other household had already chosen the same location. This, however, is a very rare occurrence because households in Palokhi are usually well-informed about such matters. Information about site selection is not made known through formal or institutionalised means such as “meetings of elders” and so on; it is made known in the course of conversation in the day or, more usually, in the evenings after meals when the Palokhi Karen visit one another for pleasure and to organise labour for some task or other. Where use rights are concerned, households retain residual rights to swiddens which they have cultivated before but this takes the form of having access to some of the cultigens which continue to grow when the swiddens are left fallow and it is an access that is by no means restricted to others in most instances. Because swidden land is readily available, households for all practical purposes do not hold on to usufructuary rights to fallow swiddens.

The existence of ample forest reserves for swiddening in the Huai Thung Choa valley has two important implications for an understanding of swidden production in Palokhi. First, the fallow periods of cultivated land are very long. Many households in Palokhi have never returned to swiddens which they previously cultivated. In some cases, a few households have cultivated land previously swiddened by other households, but this has been the exception rather than the rule. The shortest fallow period in these isolated cases, reported by the Palokhi Karen, is twelve years. In one highly exceptional case, one household (H2) cultivated a swidden in 1981 which it had cultivated in 1980 although the members of the household were fully aware of the fact that the rice harvest in 1981 would be drastically smaller than that in 1980. The reason why they did so was because they had considerable surpluses from the 1980 harvest and wished to take advantage of this by committing a greater proportion of their labour to opening up an additional plot of rice terraces. They expected that the previous year’s surpluses and the harvest from the additional plot would offset the decline in swidden production for the year which, as it turned out, proved to be the case.

The second important implication is that shortfalls in rice production in Palokhi are not associated with poor swiddening conditions in the form of short fallow cycles along with low levels of organic fertilisers which are the result of burning regenerated forest cover with a low biomass. The shortfalls are associated with insufficient domestic supplies of labour for a more extensive cultivation of rice to meet the needs of a relatively larger non-economically active population. In short, rice deficits in swidden (and wet-rice) cultivation are related to the generally high dependency ratios of households resulting from the fairly rapid increase in the population of Palokhi since it was first settled.