Family farming in a changing landscape : how activities change when forest disappears

In the Congo Basin forests, local communities used to live from hunting, fishing and gathering, and from slash and burn agriculture. Nowadays, few places remain isolated from the external world, and local practices often have to integrate new parameters. How do family farming and forest activities evolve in a changing landscape, when forest disappears? To answer this question we selected three social and ecological systems positioned in specific places on the forest transition curve (Mather 1992), to constitute a synchronic sample of forested social and ecological system representative of the evolution of Congo Basin Forests. We conducted in 2013 and 2014 a deep analysis of family farming in 8 villages distributed in these 3 studied sites. The method crosses a systemic approach with a systematic approach: agrarian diagnoses were conducted in the three sites (Boulaud 2014; Ferlay 2014) to evaluate technical and economic performances of family farming and forest extractive activities, in parallel, census of households were conducted (Codina Llavinia 2014; Gillet et al. 2014; Lehnebach 2014) to range family activities according to their share in the family income and as subsistence means. Results were harmonized and allowed a deep understanding of the strategy of adaptation to changes of households.