Wil de Jong

Markets drive the specialization strategies of forest peoples

Engagement in the market changes the opportunities and strategies of forest-related peoples. Efforts to support rural development need to better understand the potential importance of markets and the way people respond to them. To this end, we compared 61 case studies of the commercial production and trade of nontimber forest products from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The results show that product use is shaped by local markets and institutions, resource abundance, and the relative level of development. Larger regional patterns are also important. High-value products tend to be managed intensively by specialized producers and yield substantially higher incomes than those generated by the less specialized producers of less managed, low-value products. We conclude that commercial trade drives a process of intensified production and household specialization among forest peoples.

Factors Influencing Farmers’ Decisions to Plant Trees on Their Farms in Uttar Pradesh, India

Increasing tree planting on farms is beneficial to increase the supply of forest functions including provision or raw materials, sequestration of carbon and wildlife habitat. Tree planting decisions by farmers are governed by the knowledge base of farm households, and other factors if the farmers are rational decision-makers under their given resource endowments. A recent surge of tree planting in several states in northern India, though inadequate, coincided with efforts by national and state forest agencies to promote tree planting. This paper reports on the results of a survey into tree plantations of 176 randomly selected households distributed in 34 villages in Western Uttar Pradesh based on demographic data and other factors potentially associated with tree planting decisions. The data were used to develop a binary logistic regression model, to identify which factors influence tree planting decisions. The factors found to correlate positively and significantly with tree planting include size of landholding, overall annual income, area of irrigated land and prior experience with tree planting. It is hypothesized that the lack of significance of other factors including family size and education level was probably due to the relatively homogeneous sample. The result can be used to devise policies to promote tree planting among famers in Uttar Pradesh and possibly other states and other countries.

Integrating multiple environmental regimes: Land and forest policies under broader democratic reforms in the Bolivian tropical lowlands

Abstract The paper uses a policy integration (PI) approach to analyse forest sector reforms in tropical countries, using the case of reforms that affected the northern Bolivia forest economy. The paper provides a brief overview of PI and then analyses the various reforms that all contributed to reshaping Bolivias forest sector. The major related reforms are not only forestland tenure reforms, a new forestry law, but also important public administrative and democratic reforms. The case of democratic reforms linked with land and forestry reforms in northern Bolivia makes it possible to discuss environmental PI in a tropical context, and thus to review some of the key postulates that have been formulated on the topic, but which are to date largely based on empirical experiences from the northern hemisphere.

Discourses of community forestry

This chapter uses the discourse concept and theory to explore discourses of community forestry. The concept of community forestry (CF) was introduced by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in the 1970s and promoted by them since then. Three major shifts in CF discourses are described: the forest resource scarcity CF discourse, the tropical forest conservation CF discourse and the community enterprise CF discourse, leaving the question unanswered whether they should be considered as distinctive discourses, or rather as one discourse with different key elements. These three are the most prominent manifestations of the CF discourse, but other more specific discourses could also be identified as CF discourses or modifications of the CF discourse, such as the forest common property discourse and the adaptive forest management discourse. I analyse each of the three CF discourses, reviewing their main arguments, their main protagonists and their public manifestations. The chapter also reviews wider societal trends and how they link to the shifts in CF discourses. The forest resource scarcity CF discourse emerged shortly after the beginning of the international concern about whether the world’s limited natural resources will be sufficient to meet future economic growth and related consumption. The tropical forest conservation CF discourse appears to have been a result of international concern about tropical deforestation, which has dominated international environmental agendas since the 1980s. Finally, the community enterprise CF discourse appears closely linked to a worldwide shift towards neoliberal economic policies, a reduction in the role of government in non-public affairs and a focus on poverty reduction in international development assistance. The three examples suggest a close relation between CF discourses and practice and other wider societal environmental and economic concerns and discussions. Given the emerging concern about climate change issues, it can be predicted that a future CF discourse will likely incorporate climate change mitigation elements.

Forest product trade, wood consumption, and forest conservation—the case of 61 countries

ABSTRACT Trade barriers of forest products are often advocated in the name of protecting forest resources. Whether the promoting of trade of forest products will increase or decrease the global forest resources is still a matter of debate. We offer an assessment of how forest product trade helps shape observed forest change, by relating wood consumption change to trade of forest products based on cross-section data from 61 countries in 2010. The result shows that wood outputs have positive effects on wood consumption. Compared to domestic production, the result suggests that imports of forest products can help reduce wood consumption. This may indicate that trade liberalization can promote the allocation efficiency of timber resources across the global, which can improve the utilization efficiency and reduce the wood consumption in the world to protect the global forest resources. It is suggested that the high-efficient harvest and wood-processing technological transfer should be advocated in the international community to contribute to global forest conservation.