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341 The environments where agriculture is practiced in the Pacific Islands range from frost-prone but gardened mountain slopes at 2,600 m in Papua New Guinea through temperate-latitude New Zealand to tiny atoll islets lying scarcely above the reach of the waves in the always warm equatorial ocean. A comparable dissimilarity exists in rainfall—from virtual desert to constantly humid— and in soils, with some young volcanic and alluvial soils being highly fertile, whereas on atoll islets the only natural soil material may be no more than rough, highly alkaline coral rubble. Traditional Pacific Island agriculturalists adapted to this wide range of conditions with an even wider range of agronomic techniques and crop combinations, which enabled food production on all but the most barren islets or at the highest elevations of the larger islands. Outside of Hawai‘i, Guam, and New Zealand, the majority of today’s Pacific Island families still work the land with a wide variety of agricultural practices that continue to provide many of their daily needs, a significant portion of their cash income, and the economic and cultural foundation of a relatively benign and bountiful existence. We gratefully acknowledge the input of Bill Clarke, coauthor of the first edition of this chapter. Origins No longer is indigenous Pacific agriculture seen to be the result of a simple transfer into the islands of an agriculture developed outside the region—with Southeast Asia commonly believed to be the hearth. Although many domesticated and wild plants and animals of Southeast Asian origin and domestication were transferred to New Guinea and beyond to the insular Pacific without significant change (certain species of yam, for instance), it can now be argued that the peoples who settled Western Melanesia thirty to forty thousand years ago gradually developed their own distinctive indigenous agricultural and land-use systems and domesticated a variety of plants, including sago, one type of Colocasia taro, Canarium nut, one kind of banana, sugar cane, kava, the pandanus nut of high-elevation New Guinea, several fruit trees, and other plants (Clarke 1994; Yen 1990). The earliest dates for agriculture in New Guinea can be traced back to at least nine thousand years ago (Bayliss-Smith and Golson 1992). Brief mention must also be made of the sweet potato, which originated neither in Melanesia nor Asia but in the American tropics. The widespread presence of the sweet potato in indigenous (pre-European-contact) Pacific agriculture—where it became extremely important in places such as Highland New Guinea and New Zealand—has been explained by various theories of prehistoric migration or as the result of Spanish and Portuguese introductions during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Recent archeological evidence from Mangaia in the Cook Islands of the crop’s presence there around 1000 CE (Hather and Kirch 1991), together with linguistic evidence, supports earlier assumptions of its pre-European introduction into central Polynesia from the east, directly from tropical America (Scaglion and Soto 1994; Yen 1974). Based on crop plants and associated wild plants (e.g., indigenous or naturalized exotic weeds, trees, and fallow vegetation) from these three sources—the Pacific Islands themselves, Southeast Asia, and tropical America—a range of indigenous Pacific forms of agriculture evolved in response to varying environmental conditions, local agronomic innovations, the levels of available labor supply and basic demand for food that depend on population dynamics, and the diversity of deep cultural attributes often assigned to food and food production, as exemplified, for instance, by the “uneconomic ” effort and attention put into growing the highly esteemed greater yams (Dioscorea alata) (e.g., Bonnemaison 1994: 172–176). Production Systems One way to classify agriculture is to subdivide it on the basis of the purposes and the socioeconomic organization of production. Such a classification of Pacific Island production systems, or “modes of production,” has been provided by Ward (1980) and Yen (1980). The oldest of these is the integral subsistence system, in which virtually all the requirements of the community are produced locally, cash cropping is absent, and the producers and consumers are the same set of people. The integral subsistence system is now rare in its pure form and would be found, if at all, only in the remoter parts of the island of New Guinea. Elsewhere, it has given way to mixed subsistence–cash cropping, which began shortly after the coming of the first permanent European settlers. Under this system, 28 Agriculture Harley I. Manner and Randolph R. Thaman 342 ■ The Pacific Islands islanders added...

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