Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
earning a cash income through the sale of the big three commodity crops. Walnuts in par-
ticular were fetching a very good price at the time: 12-13 yuan for one
jin
(half-kilogram).
The local tea, a slightly different variety than Yunnan's famous Pu'er Tea, was selling for
7-8 yuan for one
jin
. Of course, tree crops such as walnuts and tea require a considerable
upfront investment and entail the opportunity cost of waiting for several years as the trees
mature enough to produce a crop.
AGRICULTURAL LIVELIHOODS IN TRANSITION
One major goal of the survey effort was to determine how resettlement affects agricultural
livelihoods in the Lancang River basin. When a dam is built and a reservoir fills behind it,
inundating people's homes and farmland, how do their landholdings, cropping strategies,
and income change, and what does this change mean for their future? Answering these
questions turns out to be more difficult than it first appears. Researchers seeking to un-
derstand the effects of dam-induced resettlement on communities face some serious meth-
odological challenges. Ideally, one would collect longitudinal data from communities be-
fore and after resettlement, documenting how social and economic conditions vary from
a known baseline. But the effects of resettlement typically unfold over a long time hori-
zon, often many decades, making this approach impractical without an army of researchers
and an unlimited budget. Having neither, our research team opted instead for a cross-sec-
tional study approach that compared resettled communities with nearby communities that
had similar demographic characteristics but had not undergone resettlement. This cross-
sectional approach did not allow us to directly measure diachronic change in agricultural
livelihoods for any given household, but it did allow for a systematic examination of dif-
ferences between households based on resettlement status.
10
Of the households in the sample, about one-third (32.4 percent) had been resettled at the
time of the survey.
Table 3.3
compares resettled and nonresettled households based on their
land holdings, crop sales, and income. In regards to land holdings, resettled households
held more paddy land (+0.8
mu
), less dry land (−8.9
mu
), and far less forest land (−9.9
mu
)
than their counterparts who had not undergone resettlement.
Not Resettled
(
n
= 513)
Resettled
(
n
= 246)
Paddy Land
†
Land Holdings (
mu
)
1.0
1.8
