Conclusions

Although frontier areas in the humid tropics are handicapped by adverse natural and infrastructural conditions compared with old settled regions, the examples from Sumatra show that pioneer settlers, often after years of trial and error, have been able to develop strategies for survival which are based on very specific and sometimes highly sophisticated agricultural production systems. It is interesting to note that the strategies applied by spontaneous settlers can differ quite substantially from those to be found in the state-directed settlement schemes. Although it remains an open question which of the two types of pioneer settlement will be more successful in the long run, it is certainly true that the strategies of spontaneous pioneers may well provide a variety of useful hints to regional planners and policy makers for the implementation of their settlement projects.