Agricultural Settlement and Land Use in Mountains - Mountain Geography: Physical and Human Dimensions - page 547

in Chapter 10, migration can be seasonal or permanent. For example, each year adult
males from the Drakensberg Mountains in Lesotho contract to work for a specific time
period in South African diamond mines. The host companies deduct room and board
from the workers' wages, and remit part of the salary directly to the families in Leso-
tho. At least 70 percent of households have at least one migrant worker, and 35 percent
count migratory earnings as their primary income (Cunha 2002). The shorter growing
season of the Himalaya leads to an earlier harvest, freeing workers for supplemental
work in lowland fields, factories, or the service industry. For some mountain villagers,
the ability to work in the lower elevations provides insurance against crop failures in so-
cieties that otherwise lack any sort of welfare or disaster assistance. Papua New Guinea
highlanders habitually seek employment with lowland tribes when their potato crops
fail. In other cases, the demand for outside capital and the appeal of a more lucrative life
elsewhere prompts a permanent departure. Each year the oil-rich Gulf States, Western
Europe, and the United States host thousands of workers from the mountains of South-
west Asia, North Africa, and Latin America, respectively. The infusion of outside capital
permits local investment in farms and livestock—essential during lean periods—and of-
ten puts education, health care, and consumer goods within reach of mountain residents
for the first time. The material benefits, however, are not always evenly spread among
the population. In the Karakoram of Pakistan, many male workers abandon their fields
and pastures to seek wage-earning jobs in the plains or with mountaineering expedi-
tions. The cash affords the men status and access to consumer goods, but also increases
the subsistence workload on the women they leave behind (Azhar-Hewitt 1999).
A fourth and final influence promoting modernization is the astronomical rise in glob-
al tourism, as discussed further in Chapter 12. Although a tourist tradition arose in
European and North American mountains in the late 1800s, this source of non-agrari-
an income was minor or nonexistent in the mountains of developing countries before
the 1970s. In nearly all mountain regions, the income from migrant labor and tourism
does not replace agriculture as the economic foundation, but instead provides invest-
ment for home and field, and a modest opportunity to engage in the global economy.
There are exceptions, however, such as in the Everest region of Nepal, where, in the
last two decades, tourism has enriched the local Sherpa to the extent that Rai migrants
now perform most of the agricultural and grazing tasks, often under the supervision of
the Sherpani, as well as running visitor lodges.
With this understanding of the verticality concept, the distinction between a gener-
alist and a specialist lifeway, and an appreciation of how various internal and external
influences promote modernization, we now turn to the heart of this chapter: the four
generalized land-use strategies employed by mountain farmers.
Sedentary Agriculture
Sedentary agriculture represents almost complete and permanent reliance on farming
for income, in more or less the same location. In the developing world, many farmers
exploit small plots intensively by utilizing every sliver of available land (Figs. 11.4,
11.5). Sedentary specialists establish permanent settlements and enduring economic
links with lowland populations. Consistently high population growth provides a depend-
able source of local labor. A growing number of this mountain populace now seeks work