SPECIAL FEATURE
Not seeing the forest for the trees?
Charlie Shackleton
Arguably this well-known English idiom can be traced back to at least the mid-16th century, a time of great exploration and the dawn of widespread forest and biodiversity exploitation as colonial powers sought riches from new resources and what were to them, new lands.
Whilst a few dozen non-timber species, mainly spices and foodstuffs, became international commodities in a glint of historical time, (and were relatively soon moved out of the forest into monocultural plantations), the primary value of forests was perceived to be in exotic hardwoods. The overwhelming majority of the incredible array of biodiversity in the forests, and indigenous peoples’ use and knowledge of it, was overlooked as explorers, colonial officers and afterwards, conservators, failed to see the forests for the trees, the valuable timber trees that is. + READ MORE
INTERVIEW: Paul Vantomme
“My motto has always been: any time we can ‘move’ a NWFP into the agriculture sector this is a success for both the people (farmers), the product (better quality and more production) and for the forest/nwfp species (less susceptible to overexploitation).”+ READ MORE
REGIONAL DISPATCHES
NWFPs and community development: observations from the field
Eric T. Jones and Tim Brigham
Non-wood forest products (NWFPs) have for many years been seen as providing fertile ground for community development initiatives, especially those focused on rural, remote, indigenous, and/or economically marginalized communities. The reasons for this perspective are many, but largely reflect the need to identify opportunities where people live, and that NWFPs represent some of the last supposedly ‘unallocated’ resources in many parts of rural North America and other rural places in the world. In this article, as two practitioners with a combined 40+ years of experience in the field, we offer a handful of observations based on NWFP research and development projects with communities in British Columbia, Manitoba, the United States, Mexico, Indonesia, the Russian Far East and other places. + READ MORE
Photo credit: ©FAO/Mario Marzot
Commentary on NTFPs
Erin Sills
After swinging wildly from optimism to pessimism in the final decades of the 20th century, the scientific literature and policy discourse about NWFPs have come to better reflect their heterogeneous roles in the livelihoods and quality of life of societies across the globe. Between internationally traded commodities (which many optimists sought to harness for sustainable development) and famine foods (the quintessential pessimistic view of NWFPs), there is a vast middle ground of NWFPs that are traded in regional markets, with demand grounded in cultural traditions, and produced on a gradient from wild harvested to forest farmed, making up a diverse basket of products that insure and enhance quality of life. + READ MORE
Call for open consultation on NWFPs statistical classification
Yanshu Li, Arvydas Lebedys
Information about production and international trade of non-wood forest products (NWFPs) has been collected for a number of years by the FAO Forestry Department. Statistics about some NWFPs were formally collected on an annual basis from countries up to 1972. Statistics about the most important NWFPs in countries are still collected periodically as part of FAO’s global Forest Resource Assessment (FRA). Other data is also collected from time to time as part of special studies, field projects and household surveys. With growing interest about the contribution of forests to food security, poverty alleviation and livelihoods, improving statistics about the production and trade of NWFPs is now a priority for FAO. + READ MORE
NWFPs in the bio-based economy of Europe
Davide Pettenella
Bio (or nature)-based economy and “green” economy are much used key-concepts to describe and design the development strategy of Europe. NWFP are considered a relevant component of this strategy when it is applied to the rural sector. However, when we try to go deeper into the concept of bio-based economy, we find that there are quite opposite views in promoting the role of forest resources in the European rural development policies. Running the risk of an oversimplification, we could describe a dualistic approach: what could be described as a technological approach to the ideas of a bio-based development vs. a social one. These two approaches can be referred also to the NWFP sector. + READ MORE
Q&A with Amy Ickowitz, Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, on NWFPs, forests and nutrition
“I think it is especially important to understand how communities use the natural landscape, their farms, and markets for different foods and how these different sources either complement or substitute as sources of foods. As land use change speeds up in the tropical world, we need to understand the potential impacts of these changes on diets.“ + READ MORE
Central Africa: The importance of non-wood forest products to food and nutritional security
Ousseynou Ndoye
Non Wood Forest Products (NWFP) are important for the livelihood of rural communities living in Central Africa. They provide food, fuelwood, fruits, leaves, medicinal products and construction materials. Although NWFP are important to food and nutrition security, they have always been overlooked in government policies and in international debates. This situation needs to be changed to better demonstrate the contribution of these products to hunger and malnutrition reduction but also to household income generation and complementarities between the forestry sector and the other sectors. + READ MORE
Looking ahead: analysing NWFPs in the “glocal” market
Enrico Vidale, Riccardo Da Re and Davide Pettenella
In a dynamic world where every day new products and services are created and traded it is rather hard to define and keep records of all relevant non-wood forest products (NWFP), a category of products and species that have common origins – forests, plantations or other wooded lands – but with very different uses and differently organized supply chains. Hence, what to include or exclude in the NWFP concept is a crucial point in order to understand volumes and market and non-market values, as well to compare data over time and regions. This is not a new topic and it was actually one of the first problems which led FAO to establish a harmonized definition of NWFPs in 1995 in consultation with global experts. FAO’s definition has since been a reference point for researchers, but other functional or contingent definitions have been used on scientific works. + READ MORE
PRODUCT WATCH
Palm fronds (Xate) in Guatemala
 Harvested here in Uaxactún and in other community forest concessions in Guatemala’s Maya Biosphere Reserve, the ornamental xate (Chamaedorea elegans, C. ernesti-augusti, C. oblongata, and C. nerochlamys) palm fronds will end up adorning floral arrangements more than a thousand miles away in the United States and beyond. Xate is just one of several plants and trees that residents in the northernmost reaches of Guatemala harvest, process, and export. One of the best ways to protect the rainforest, it turns out, is to hand its management over to communities whose livelihoods depend on it. Guatemalan communities have been up to the task, engaging in the carefully regulated extraction of timber and plants while protecting their sections of the Maya Biosphere Reserve at the same time. + READ MORE
Photo credit: ©Mongabay/Sandra Cuffe
LITERATURE
Awono, A.; Eba'a Atyi, R.; Foundjem-Tita, D.; Levang, P. 2016. Vegetal non-timber forest products in Cameroon, contribution to the national economy. International Forestry Review 18(1): 12. (available at: www.cifor.org/library/6041/vegetal-non-timber-forest-products-in-cameroon-contribution-to-the-national-economy/).
Balama, C., Augustino, S., Eriksen, S. & Makonda, F.S. 2016. The role of priority non-timber forest products in enhancing local adaptive capacity to climate change stresses in Kilombero district, Tanzania. Climate and Development. (available at: www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17565529.2016.1167662).
Camposo et al. 2016. “Extractivism of Plant Resources” in Introduction to Ethnobiology. Springer. Pp. 205–211. (available at: http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-28155-1_30).
Darabant, A., Rai, P.B., Staudhammer, C.L, & Dorji, T. 2016. Designing and Evaluating Bamboo Harvesting Methods for Local Needs: Integrating Local Ecological Knowledge and Science. Environmental Management, pp.1–11.
Duffy, R., St John, F.A.V., Büscher, B., & Brockington, D. 2015. The militarization of anti-poaching: undermining long term goals? Environ. Conserv. 42(4):345-348.
Foster, R.J., Harmsen, B.J., Macdonald, D.W., Collins, J., Urbina, Y., Garcia, R., & Doncaster, C.P. 2016. Wild meat: a shared resource amongst people and predators. Oryx 50(1):63-75.
Furukawa, T., Kiboi, S., Mutiso, P., & Fujiwara, K. 2016. Multiple use patterns of medicinal trees in an urban forest in Nairobi, Kenya. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening. Pp. 34–40.
Gillet, P., Veeulen, C., Doucet, J.L., Codina, E., Lehnebach, C., Feintrenie, L.rm 2016. What Are the Impacts of Deforestation on the Harvest of NTFPs in Central Africa?Forests7(5), 106. doi:10.3390/f7050106.
Hardt, E., Borgomeo, E., dos Santos, R.F., Pinto, L.F.G., Metzger, J.P., & Sparovek, G. 2015. Does certification improve biodiversity conservation in Brazilian coffee farms? Forest Ecol. Manag. 357:181-194.
Lynser, M. B., Tiwari, B. K. 2016. Diversity and Utilisation of Floral Non Timber Forest Products by the Communities in Rural Meghalaya, North-East India. Journal of Forest and Environmental Science. Vol. 32, 1, pp. 39—54. (available at: www.koreascience.or.kr/article/ArticleFullRecord.jsp?cn=SRGHBV_2016_v32n1_39).
Ludvig, A., Tahvanainen, V., Dickson, A., Evard, C., Kurttila, M., Cosovic, M., Chapman, E., Wilding, M. Weiss, G. 2016. The practice of entrepreneurship in the non-wood forest products sector: Support for innovation on private forest land. Forest Policy and Economics, 66: pp. 31–37. Volume 66, May 2016, Pages 31–37.
Makoto E., Kimihiko, H. , Hisako, N., Toshiya, M., & Heng Sokhf, C. 2016. Land Use Policy, 52: pp.92–102. (available at: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026483771500397X).
Mutandwa, E. & Kanyarukiga, R. 2016. Understanding the role of forests in rural household economies: experiences from the Northern and Western provinces of Rwanda. Southern Forests: A Journal of Forest Science. 78:2, pp.115-122.
Sisak, L., Riedl, M., Dudik, R. 2016. Non-market non-timber forest products in the Czech Republic – Their socio-economic effects and trends in forest land use. Land Use Policy, Vol. 50, 390-398.
Snook, L., et al. 2015. Trees for Food and Timber: are community interests in conflict with those of timber concessions in the Congo Basin? Conference Paper: World Forestry Congress, Durban, South Africa. (available at: www.researchgate.net)
GENERAL NEWS
National Socio-economic surveys in forestry: Guidance and survey models
FAO along with CIFOR, IFRI, PROFOR, and LSMS-ISA team of the World Bank are developing the sourcebook ‘’National socioeconomic surveys in forestry: Guidance and survey modules for measuring the multiple roles of forests in household welfare and livelihoods” which is expected to provide guidance mainly for the National Statistical Offices and other users for collecting forestry-relevant socioeconomic data, including NWFPs, at national level. Specialized modules on forest and wild products in this publication are expected to fill current information gaps concerning the contributions from forest and wild products to household well-being. It is expected to be launched in October, 2016. See a draft here.
Foraging the untapped value of Europe's forests
EU-funded researchers have identified the untapped commercial potential of products like wild berries, mushrooms, nuts and plants growing in Europe's forests for the benefit of rural communities - a way to generate growth and jobs. Forests provide a huge range of goods and services, but their true economic potential to Europe remains underestimated. + READ MORE
Small business solutions to a big problem
The world’s governments have committed to end deforestation by 2020 and many global companies are following suit by making their supply chains deforestation free. But what happens in areas where global businesses are absent? And what role can small and medium enterprises play in solving deforestation? With poor infrastructure and few roads, Nepal’s mountains are not fertile ground for international companies. But these regions are rich with small business. + READ MORE
Bees are bellwethers for the healthy agricultural ecosystems they help create
Bees make a priceless contribution to agriculture and are a bellwether for environmental health, working without pay while both delivering and reflecting biodiversity. "A world without pollinators would be a world without food diversity - and in the long run, without food security," FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva said today during a visit to Slovenia ending the national beekeepers' festival. + READ MORE
Indonesia: The rise of rattan from Namo Village
Rattan has long been a mainstay of Central Sulawesi (Sulawesi). However, since 2011, after the release of Trade Minister Regulation No. 35/2011 on the ban of export of rattan and rattan products, there was a downturn in the rattan industry. The ban on the export of raw rattan and semi-finished made many entrepreneurs go out of business. The opposite occurred in the village of Namo. In the village, located in District Kulawi, Sigi, the rattan industry arose with renewed vigor. + READ MORE
More news: http://www.fao.org/forestry/nwfp/en/
Articles express the views of their authors, not necessarily those of FAO. The designations employed and the presentation of material in this e-publication do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the FAO concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries.
*Photo credit: ©FAO/Giulio Napolitano
|
