For Environment, Democracy and Livelihoods
Management of non-timber forest products: recent innovations in resource assessment and sustainable harvesting.
Non-Timber Forest Products (NTFP) are being increasingly recognized for their crucial roles in rural livelihoods, biodiversity conservation and export earnings. In order to cater to increasing levels of subsistence as well as commercial needs of a broad range of people involved in the NTFP sector, more intensive management and extraction of NTFP has become mandatory. This necessitates more careful assessment of NTFP resource base as well as devising sustainable harvesting systems. Stakeholders have started to respond to this concern at various levels, and several initiatives to ensure sustainable management of NTFP have been started within the framework of community forestry. As the community forestry practices were focused more on mid-hills than the Terai or the High Mountains, where most of the NTFP are endemic, the question of NTFP resource assessment did not get adequate attention until very recently. Most of the operational plans (OP) for managing community forests (CF) contain management provisions for timber, fuelwood and fodder only. NTFP are generally excluded in the OP with few exceptional cases which received support from some NGO or projects interested in NTFP. FUG are not authorized for use and management of NTFP if they are not included in OP. Recently, however, with increasing awareness of the value of NTFP, the need to better assess the status of NTFP resources was realized…..
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