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2 A Future Discounting Explanation for the Persistence of a Mixed Foraging-Horticulture Strategy among the Mikea of Madagascar Bram Tucker 22 This chapter pursues dual goals. The first goal is to argue in favor of the use of future-discounting concepts when modeling choices among subsistence activities with dissimilar delay to reward, such as the choice to practice foraging versus farming. While foraging theory makes the value of all options commensurate by expressing them as a rate of gain per unit time, people may subjectively devalue options with long waiting times, such as agricultural harvests. A literature review and guide to discount rates are presented for readers unfamiliar with these concepts. The second goal is to demonstrate the applicability of future discounting models by presenting a simple dynamic model explaining why Mikea of Madagascar prefer labor-extensive cultivation despite the high risk and low mean payoff, and despite their familiarity with the techniques and benefits of intensive farming. Mikea cultivate because the rewards are high compared with foraging, but they refrain from intensification because immediate needs limit their capacity for future investment. Low-investment extensive horticulture, the planting of cultigens with minimal labor investment in patches of wilderness that remain more-or-less untended until harvest time, seems a curious strategy. Payoffs tend to be low on average, for the cultigens compete with wild plants for soil and solar resources. Returns are also highly variable, for the crop is left vulnerable to pests, predators, and unpredictable climatic conditions. Extensive horticulturalists compensate for low and variable harvests by hunting and gathering wild foods, which constitute the bulk of the diet in some years. Given this heavy reliance on foraging, one may well ask why plant cultigens at all? Conversely, why refrain from intensifying agricultural inputs to produce a more dependable and satisfying agricultural payoff? As curious as the foraging/low investment horticulture strategy may appear, archaeological evidence suggests this was a persistent strategy for millennia in many parts of the world. Some of the first cultigens may have been domesticated rather rapidly, in the span of 20 or so plant generations (Hillman and Davies 1990a, b; Hillman and Davies 1992). There followed a long period of time in which people continued to rely primarily on foraging while horticulture played an ancillary role. According to Bruce Smith (2001a), this middle ground between plant domestication and intensive farming lasted 3000 years in the Near East, 4000 years in some parts of North America and Europe, and 5500 years in central Mexico (see also Piperno and Pearsall 1998; Doolittle 2000). Archaeologists interested in subsistence decisions have as a guide the behavior of living peoples, observed and documented with ethnographic and experimental methods and informed by evolutionary theories of human behavior (O’Connell 1995). This chapter describes Mikea of southwestern Madagascar, a contemporary ethnographic population who combine low-investment maize and manioc horticulture with foraging for wild tubers, honey, and small game. The most important subsistence and cash crop for Mikea was, until recently, maize grown in slash-and-burn fields called hatsake (the “ethnographic present” for this chapter is before the government effectively banned hatsake cultivation in 2002). Mikea invest little labor and no other inputs into their maize fields. New fields are cleared by felling and burning trees. Old fields are reused for several years and then abandoned. They are usually cleared of weeds and saplings before planting, although some farmers reduce labor costs even further by planting among the weeds. After planting, no additional labor is invested until harvest time. The fields are exposed to severe sunlight, unpredictable rainfall, poor soil nutrition, weedy competition, and predation by grasshoppers and unsupervised herds of cattle and goats. Mikea are aware of a variety of intensification techniques that could increase maize yields and reduce risk of failure, such as tillage, irrigation, manure fertilizers, weeding, enclosure, and field guarding, but they rarely practice these. Instead , they return to their fields three months after planting and harvest whatever happens to be there. Most Mikea households in the study area also grow manioc in permanent fields in the savanna, alongside their Masikoro agropastoral neighbors. Masikoro cultivate manioc semiintensively on a 12-to 15-month schedule. Some farmers plant in plowed furrows or mounds, and dig drainage ditches to avert flood damage; and they weed their fields three to four times a year. Fields are enclosed with fences and guarded with talismans to protect them from animal, human, and supernatural predators. Forest-dwelling Mikea rarely practice...

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