Tree crops and paddy cropping systems: cocoa in Malinau.

This chapter looks at one particular area, the Malinau regency (part of the Bulungan district in East Kalimantan province), to try to determine why some cocoa smallholders choose to clear short fallow rather than primary and secondary forest. The Malinau regency was still widely forested in the late 1990s. Most of the Dayak population lived in the mountainous hinterland. Local Dayak migrations to the river started only in the late 1950s and remain limited. Until recent years, a full day was required for a trip by wooden boat from Malinua to Tarakan on the coast. This may have hampered migrations from outside Kalimantan and saved the forest for a while. What conditions are necessary for cocoa to be an agent of reforestation rather than deforestation when forest is still available? Surprisingly, cocoa adoption in the uplands seems to help promote rainfed and irrigated paddy fields in the lowlands and thus saves some forests from the spread of slashand-burn for paddy. What are the conditions that explain such a scenario?