The National Network of Forest Practitioners (NNFP) is a grassroots alliance of rural people who are striving to build an ecologically sound forest economy whose benefits are accessible to communities that have traditionally depended on the forest for their well-being. NNFP’s 500 members include community-based non-profits, small businesses, indigenous groups, forest workers, researchers, agency officials, and landowners.
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Recently some forty locally based community practitioners, academics, graduate students, and NGO heads (see http://www.nnfp.org and http://www.ncfc.org for more information) met for four days at the Federation of Southern Co-operatives ( http://www.fsclaf.org ) in Epes, Alabama, USA, in order to discuss trends in community forestry (CF) and community-based ecosystem management (CBEM) in the United States.
The Department of Rio San Juan is located near the southern frontier of Nicaragua, bordering Costa Rica, and the municipality of El Castillo is on the river between the Lake of Nicaragua and the Caribbean. During the eighties, the United States attacked us with a low intensity war that eroded the economy and uprooted Nicaraguan families. At the end of the war, during the nineties, twelve thousand people from Costa Rica and other parts of the country, immigrated to the Municipality.
The Central American Community Agro-forestry Indigenous and Peasant Co-ordination Association, known as CICAFOC, operates in Central America --involving Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama-- and is a community-based social, non profit-making organisation, gathering organised associations, co-operatives, federations and community groups of small and medium sized agro-forestry producers, indigenous people and peasants.
More than ten years of negotiations between government officials, local community groups and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have led to a draft community forest bill which would be Thailand’s first legislation recognising the legal status of communities living in and around Thailand’s National Forest Reserves to use, manage and protect their forests in co-operation with the Royal Forestry Department.
The rapid depletion of Filipino forests by logging, mining and settler encroachment was officially acknowledged as requiring a policy response in the late 1980s. The need to limit and regulate logging and to promote community forestry alternatives was accepted by government by the end of the decade. In 1990, the government adopted a Master Plan for Forestry Development which entailed an attempt to ‘scale up’ previous community-level initiatives in forest management.
The Indonesian NGO movement has been supporting CBFM start since 1995. The main message of the start-up phase was that most of the CBFM models that developed in a sustainable way were based on community wisdom, culture and custom.
Forests in Indonesia have been rapidly depleting since the 1960s when the practice became prevalent of handing out logging concessions to military commanders. Logging quickly expanded to supply cheap logs to the Japanese timber industry principally to produce plywood. Under heavy pressure from government-directed colonisation programmes forest loss escalated, a process further exaggerated by large-scale schemes, some developed with foreign assistance, to expand tree crops in ‘conversion forests’.
India’s experiments with Joint Forest Management (JFM) grew out of attempts by forestry officials to accommodate ‘tribal’ demands to manage their own forests. [The indigenous peoples of India are officially referred to as ‘Scheduled Tribes’]. Under JFM forests remain the property of the State under the jurisdiction of Forest Departments but local communities are contracted to manage the forests and retain a portion of profits from the sale of harvests.
The seed for the initiative on Good Forest Governance (GFG) in Asia was planted at the Forest, Trees and People Program (FTPP) meeting held in Daman, Nepal, April 2000. Partners at that meeting recognized the need to involve civil society more actively in community-based forest management (CBFM), as well as the possible roles of a regional association to support this process.
Two years later, the GFG seed began to germinate with the support of a Ford Foundation grant to the Regional Community Forestry Training Centre for Asia and the Pacific (RECOFTC) aimed at testing:
Recent changes in the Forest Policy of Tanzania (1998) and the forthcoming new Forest Act which further operationalises that Policy, have paved the way for several changes in the way that forest conservation might be achieved in Tanzania, including guidelines on the development of Community-Based Forest Management (CBFM) and Joint Forest Management (JFM). These changes also mean alterations in the potential roles of the Forestry Department, the local communities and various conservation NGOs.
Community forests are a new kind of mechanism of progressive local community responsibility for forest and forest resource management. So far, thirty-five community forests have been allocated by the Ministry of the Environment.
The results of management models developed so far have been discrete and limited, and experience is fairly recent. Most of them are still at a learning stage.