Local land use strategies in a globalizing world: Subsistence farming, cash crops and income diversification

This paper introduces the special issue, which deals with local rural people's responses to external and internal pressures brought about by global change processes. The contributions are grouped in three categories: (1) Deforestation, land use change and local management systems, including papers on the spread of an alien wattle species in South Africa, large scale forest conservation and rehabilitation in China and consequences of government efforts to reverse deforestation in Indonesia; (2) Subsistence farming and cash crop interaction, addressed by two articles on swidden systems in Malaysia and Indonesia; and (3) Land use change and income diversification, which includes two contributions on changing livelihoods of farmers in Tanzania and Papua New Guinea and one paper developing a method for identifying and mapping the spatial distribution of farming systems in Vietnam. All articles were originally presented at an International Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2003, under the auspices of the Danish University Consortium on Environment and Development - Sustainable Land Use and Natural Resource Management (DUCED SLUSE).