In recent years there has been increasing appreciation both of the direct importance of forests and trees to rural people, and of the problems that the latter face as mounting pressures on their land and resource base lead to reduction in tree cover in their immediate vicinity (e.g., FAO 1978, Eckholm 1979, Budowski 1982). "Forestry for local community development," "community forestry" or "social forestry" have emerged as alternative umbrella terms for programmes to provide support to rural communities and individuals in carrying out forestry activities to maintain and expand the goods and services they need from forests and forest trees.
Forestry for local community development is thus concerned with enabling people both to draw upon existing forests, and where needed to grow more trees, in order to secure such inputs into their life system as supplies of fuelwood, food, fodder, building timbers and other products for the home and farm, income to supplement returns from agriculture, and protection of their agricultural land base. One of its basic features is the active involvement and participation of the people in the forest management process (FAO 1978).
Programmes to provide rural communities with fuelwood and other forest products are not new. They have usually featured prominently in the activities of forest services, though in the last couple of decades they tended to become overshadowed by the priority attached to industrial and protection forestry. What is new in recent years is the recognition that the huge size and widespread dispersion of needs for local tree resources are now so great that the task of growing and managing them can only be tackled in an essentially self-help fashion by the people themselves, and that to attract such participation forestry must be attractive to them.
This perception has brought with it growing understanding that such participatory forestry will often entail quite radical changes to conventional forestry practices, both in terms of selection of what to grow and of how to organize planting and management, and also in terms of what form government involvement and support needs to take in situations where foresters have a supportive rather than an executive role.
Many programmes and projects designed to encourage and support forestry for local community development are now in existence, but few have been in place long enough to complete a full cycle of production and use. The process of learning what are the requisites for success in community forestry is, therefore, still at an early stage. This paper reviews some of the rapidly accumulating experience, and the lessons that are being learnt from it, with special reference to experience in areas where community forestry is contributing to integrated watershed management.
Community forestry programmes, if they are to achieve the necessary participation of people, must be based on benefits which the latter recognize to be consistent with their priorities and possibilities, and commensurate with the inputs they will have to make. Though this principle is by now widely accepted, in practice many of the problems of such projects clearly stem from failure to correctly identify what these benefits, and inputs, would actually be in a particular situation. Projects are still commonly influenced more by the perceptions of the project promoters and designers, viewing the situation from outside, than by the wishes of potential beneficiaries inside the situation.
Calculation of benefits and costs of a project from the point of view of the community, individual, or the forest service will generally lead to different assessments (Romm, 1980). Thus, people seldom plant or protect trees explicitly to reverse deforestation, though the trees they grow may contribute to slowing the process. They preserve trees or plant new trees in order to provide continued supplies of products and services that they need (FAO, in preparation). The pattern of tree cover that results from community forestry activities is, therefore, likely to be quite different from earlier patterns of forest cover, with the trees clustered in small groups and lines close to the households and villages, and will not necessarily be located where tree cover is most needed for watershed management purposes.
Thus, with its focus on direct benefits to those participating in it, forestry for local community development should not be expected to achieve the primarily protective goals that integrated watershed management needs to pursue at the macro level in order to safeguard downstream populations and economic activities, and long term environmental stability.² What it can achieve, by providing alternative sources of supply of forest products, is to relieve the pressures on forests which do serve this protective function. Equally it can contribute vitally to stable land use at the micro level of the farm, and to income generation and economic diversification for people living in watershed management areas.
It is equally important that a community forestry project correctly reflect people's priorities within this range of possible benefits. Many early projects were motivated by concerns to find solutions to fuelwood shortages, and tended to be based on the assumption that the removal of the fuelwood shortage through growing more trees would itself be a sufficient benefit. This was hardly surprising. At least to outside observers, the problems created by deteriorating fuelwood supplies appeared to provide incentive enough to those involved to do something about them.
Severe though these problems are, they have seldom by themselves stimulated local remedial actions. People do not isolate their fuelwood problem in this way. A fuelwood shortage is only one of several or many problems they face. Moreover, fuel is seldom the only product they get from trees, and often not the most important. A recent survey in hill areas in Nepal, for example, disclosed that the principal concern was with tree fodder, because it had become even more difficult to obtain than fuelwood (Campbell and Bhattarai, 1983).
In some cases benefits from trees may be narrowly definable, for example, when they are being grown to produce a cash crop. More frequently there will be multiple benefits that need to be taken into account. In addition to poles, fuelwood and fodder, people widely derive fruits, nuts, fibres, leaves, oils and gums and other products of edible or saleable value from the forest or forest trees, as well as shelter and shade, and the soil nutrients which trees bring to the surface in the form of humus. Community forestry, therefore, often needs to provide for several functions of trees and forests in the life of rural people, and the latter are more likely to respond to projects that enhance a broad set of benefits available from the presence of trees than to projects that try to address just one, more limited, objective.
A clear understanding of the interrelationships which can affect tree growing and use in many rural situations is also essential if projects are to succeed. Not only do trees have multiple uses, but tree outputs often have several substitutes which may or may not be easier for the people to obtain or provide than trees, the land needed for trees can be put to alternative uses, there may be competing claims on the labour needed for planting and tending the trees, and so on. Production and use of tree products at the village level, in fact, is often embedded in complex resource and social systems. Most of the factors that affect our ability to intervene with forestry solutions are of a nonforestry nature. They are primarily human factors, connected with the ways in which people organize their land and other resources (FAO, 1983).
² Though people can, of course, also be mobilized to participate in creating or managing such protective forests through wage employment, or other financial incentives, in addition to their essentially self-help needs-oriented community forestry activities.
Many community forestry projects consequently need to have broader objectives than simply increasing the supply of wood and other tree products. Some are designed to contribute to local institution building or employment generation. Others are established within an even more ambitious framework of social and environmental goals (Wiersum, 1984). Many have been stimulated by equity objectives -- to help the poorest segments of society through forestry activities. Equally, many have been motivated by the need to halt environmental deterioration.
Though it is quite possible to pursue more than one of these, and other objectives within a single project, not all of them are necessarily complementary or consistent one with another. Stimulating increased production of wood, for example, will not necessarily result in broad participation or in equal distribution of benefits. It is, therefore, important that the objectives of a particular project be clearly specified and understood, and that the project be fashioned in a manner which best achieves those objectives.
Just as there are different objectives that can be pursued, so there are different strategies appropriate to achieving them. Production of wood for sale will usually require a quite different approach than production for household use. Some objectives require the presence of forests as a functioning ecosystem, while others can be met by planting individual trees. Some need to be pursued through collective activity, while others are best pursued by persons or households acting individually (FAO, in preparation).
The range of options, and needs, is considerable. Unfortunately, failure to distinguish between them clearly enough, and to recognize the characteristics and limits of each, has sometimes led to confusion about the role of community or social forestry, and of its achievements (Foley and Barnard, 1984). In particular the welfare connotation of the term "social" forestry has given rise in some places to expectations that this should be its sole output. In order to avoid this, and to bring the economic and other contributions that trees and forests can provide to the well-being of rural people into clearer focus, umbrella terms such as "community forestry," "social forestry" or "forestry for local community development" need to be disaggregated to allow a clearer focus on the variety of component situations and systems they encompass. In the three following sections, some of the principal different dimensions are discussed in more detail.
In many parts of the world people have customarily obtained their supplies of forest products from tree cover on adjacent common land, to which there was open access or some form of common property system of control by the members of the user group. With growth in populations putting increasing pressure both on the forest resource and on forest land, many traditional communal forest management systems have come under stress, as individuals have been forced to ignore communal restraints in order to meet their own needs. A widespread response to this has been for communal forests either to become privatized, or to become absorbed into the public forest system as governments intervene in an attempt to reimpose controlled use. However, a more appropriate and efficient solution may often be to build on the traditional communal system and adapt it to the changing needs.
The community forestry programme in the hill areas of Nepal is one instance where this approach is being taken. Systems of common property management of local areas of forest have long been practised throughout the middle hills of the country. As these systems came under increasing pressure from growing population, the government initially nationalized all forests in 1957 to introduce more intensive forest management to cope with the growing demands. This proved difficult to effect, and in 1978 the government enacted new legislation to transfer control of selected forest areas back to local populations, through the panchayat structure of local government.
A prerequisite required by government to transfer a forest area is the establishment of a forest committee by the panchayat concerned, which would be responsible for management of the forest, according to an agreed management plan. Certain guidelines are laid down concerning membership structure in order to try and ensure participation by all sections of the community. Government provides extension services to give access to needed technical knowledge, and financing for the employment of local "forest watchers" to help ensure adherence to the agreed management practices. Forest nurseries are established to provide planting stock for enrichment planting -- and for the establishment of communal woodlots and private tree planting which make up the other two components of the overall community forestry effort.
The programme is still in an early phase, and the process of ironing out operational problems, e.g., by refining government regulations and procedures and by strengthening the functioning of panchayat level mechanisms, is still underway. Nevertheless progress so far has been encouraging. The number of panchayats applying to participate in the programme has exceeded targets. The negative consequences of the excessive deforestation of the recent past -- growing shortages of fodder, timber and fuelwood combined with erosion and soil loss -- are reflected in widespread local interest in maintaining and restoring forest resources through communal action. Household and leadership surveys disclose a high level of understanding of forest related problems and interest in such solutions, and informal common management systems for areas of forests have been found to exist already in 36 percent of the participating panchayats (Campbell and Bhattarai, 1983).
There are a number of powerful reasons why such communal arrangements for forest control should be preferred and encouraged, of which one of the most compelling is that only in this way can all members of the community have access to forest outputs. In the absence of a communal resource, the landless and those with too little land to devote any to tree growing will be excluded. Communal forest management systems are, therefore, essential if the poorer sections of rural societies are to benefit.
There are other advantages to communal systems of forest management. For example, economies of scale in the production of timber favor woodlots of size beyond the means of most individuals. Similarly, protection will often be easier, and less costly, if the trees are concentrated in a communal woodlot rather than dispersed over many individual holdings.
In addition, as noted earlier, many forest outputs which people require can be obtained only from a functioning forest ecosystem. Much of the fruits, foliage, vegetables, honey, fungi, bush meat, fish and other foodstuffs which contribute importantly to nutritional diversity, the medicinal plants, and the fibre and other raw materials for artisanal activities require a forest habitat for their production, and usually cannot be reproduced in woodlots or by the growing of individual trees. Management of areas of the size needed to maintain forest will usually require a communal endeavour.
Harnessing of communal efforts can, however, be equally appropriate for the creation of planted tree resources, as is shown by the village forestry programme of the Republic of Korea, which was also built on a tradition of village cooperatives in forestry. By the early 1960s, fuelwood supplies in Korea had become critically short, and tree felling on steep slopes led to severe soil erosion and flooding. In 1973 the government launched a major programme to reverse this deteriorating situation.
Villages were encouraged by the government to set up a Village Forestry Association (VFA) to plant or replant local areas best suited to forest use, supported by financial subsidies, materials and technical advice provided by the government. Within five years, more than 20,000 VFAs were in existence and more than one million hectares had been planted through the voluntary efforts of their members³ (about one-quarter for fuelwood, the rest for fruit and timber).
The success of this effort was due to a number of factors. In Korea there was little communal land, and most villagers had too little land to engage in tree growing. The government, therefore, passed legislation which granted to the VFAs authority to enter into contractual arrangements with landowners with suitable land, to enable the cooperative to acquire rights of usage on the land they needed for village forests. Another key to success was that the villagers involved were already committed to the idea of rural development, and had some experience of cooperative forestry schemes before.
³ In addition, and parallel to the VFA efforts, large areas of degraded hill forest had been restored and brought under management through employment of villagers and paid contracts to VFAs.
But the way the project was implemented was also important. Mechanisms were introduced which enabled the VFAs and the Government to cooperate effectively, in a manner which combined "top-down" and "bottom-up" planning. The VFAs were also provided with the materials, finance and information they needed quickly and efficiently, and they were not asked to do too much too quickly -- a step-by-step approach was adopted. Careful research also established exactly which species were most appropriate, and products were included in all schemes which provided villagers with early gains in income and welfare in remuneration for their efforts (Gregersen, 1982).
The requisites for successful communal action of this kind are not present everywhere. There may be no communal land, or no community level organization. If there is communal land, there may be divergencies of interest within the community as to how to use it, or on how to distribute the benefits from a community forest. Cost and benefit impacts of tree projects are likely to be different for different income groups; for different users of the land; and between landless and landowners, and within the latter between larger and small farmers; for different components within the village power structure; and even within the family between men and women and between different generations (Noronha, 1982). For example, proposals to use communal grazing land for trees will be perceived quite differently by those who presently use that land for grazing than by those who do not. Such conflicts may be very difficult to resolve in communities which do not have homogeneity of ethnic, economic or social interest, or which lack social cohesion, or where there is lack of confidence in community leadership.
Probably because of inadequate attention to such constraints, the number of successful communal forestry projects has been limited, and they have usually made less rapid progress than private planting. Tree growing by the individual household or farmer, depending as it does only on considerations of self interest, has proved to be usually easier to initiate and sustain.
As planting only by individuals will restrict tree growing only to those with land, attention has recently focused on trying to design afforestation projects for smaller groups within a community that have shared economic objectives and situation, and a measure of homogeneity of interests. In Bengal and the Philippines, for example, projects are based on groups of landless given access to public land on which to grow trees. These schemes are still too young to permit an assessment of their success, but early indications are encouraging.
The largest single component of forestry for local community development is likely comprised of tree growing by individual farmers and households. As recognized in the rapidly expanding literature on agroforestry, trees have a variety of significant contributions to make to farm production systems (e.g., Lundgren, 1982; Nair, 1984; Vergara, 1984). on-farm trees and communal forests, where they exist together, are likely to provide different inputs into the local system and so form complementary components of an overall community forestry system. In Nepal, for example, people grow trees on their own land primarily to produce fodder, and look to the communal forests and woodlots for their supplies of timber and fuelwood (Campbell and Bhattarai, 1983).
For programmes to support tree growing by individual farmers to succeed, it is important to recognize in what form costs have to be borne by a small farmer, and that particular costs may weigh more heavily in his economic calculations than in those of a forester or entrepreneur. Many of his costs and benefits take forms other than cash outlays and incomings. For example, prominent among his implicit calculations is usually consideration of risk; when living at the margins of existence, the need to avoid any change which could leave him even worse off than he is now may not be accepted even though it could improve his situation. An assessment of the options open to the farmer must, therefore, reflect these and other realities which shape his economic decisions, and not be confined simply to monetary assessments of cost and profitability (Arnold, 1983).
In many, if not most situations, rural people have already practised some form of tree management. This can range from such passive activities as limited grazing in an area, preservation of selected trees during land clearing, through planting or transplanting naturally occurring seedlings of desired species, to the active integration of trees into their land use practices. Many such tree management practices reflect earlier dynamic responses to changing needs and pressures. Any further changes need to build upon this past experience. If people now need assistance, it is essential to base it upon their traditional or existing tree cultivation systems and knowledge, and to understand the reasons which now make outside intervention necessary (FAO, in preparation).
The most commonly cited constraint to tree growing currently facing rural people is availability of land. The use of land for trees is widely perceived as being at the expense of food production, or of the use of land for grazing livestock. The very lack of trees in a landscape tends to be taken as evidence that they have had to give way to agriculture.
Competition for land is real, and food rightly takes precedence where it exists. However, trees do not necessarily compete with agriculture, nor are they always an inferior use of the land. Nor does removal of tree cover in the past necessarily imply that there is insufficient room for trees.
Competition for land in this connection is often discussed in terms of either/or choices; if land is to be devoted to tree growing it will no longer be available for crop or pasture production. The reality in many, if not most, situations is more complex and varied. In many situations, trees added to agricultural production systems can result in supplementary or complementary increases in yields and/or returns. In many more situations crops or pasture can continue to be grown under trees, even though the latter depress crop/pasture yields, because the resultant reductions in returns from the crops are more than offset by benefits from the presence of the trees.
Consequently, physical availability of land is not necessarily a constraint. While it would be unwise to minimize the importance of competition for land as a factor in local tree growing, this has probably been overstated as a reason why people do not plant more trees. Though land availability is certainly a limiting factor in some situations, in many it is not.
However, the issue of what place trees can and should play in use of land is clearly the central one for the small farmer. Just as tree growing programmes need to be based on understanding of existing tree cultivation practice, so they need equally to be framed within knowledge of how people use their land, and of the problems and possibilities within this framework for making adjustments which improve the farmer's situation. As with any other programme to help poor small farmers, tree growing programmes need to seek step-bystep incremental changes which are within the participants' capabilities and resources to absorb and apply (Raintree, 1983).
One of the most commonly cited constraints is that of the relatively long production period of most tree species. Poor farmers can seldom divert resources from producing needed food and income to a tree product which will start producing returns at best a few years into the future. This underlies the priority given to choice of tree species which provide benefits quickly.
The length of the production period imposes another economic constraint; it increases the level of risk for those, such as tenant farmers or farmers practising shifting cultivation on state land, who do not have security of tenure of the land they cultivate. Few will invest in a long-term crop such as trees if they fear that they will not be present to harvest the returns in the future. This is a fundamental constraint to individuals planting trees, which may in some situations need changes in basic legislation affecting control of the land before it can be removed.
Tree growing can be affected not only by land tenure, but also by tree tenure. ownership or use rights over trees may be distinct from ownership of the land on which they are planted. Planting trees may give the planter rights over the land, even de facto ownership. In certain circumstances this may encourage tree growing, as a means to acquiring such control over land. More widely, however, it results in landowners, whether private or public, prohibiting tree growing (Fortmann, 1984).
People are believed to be constrained also by outdated attitudes, and of lack of necessary skills and experience. In practice most rural people draw upon considerable traditional knowledge and experience of trees. However, the rate of change to which they are being exposed often renders this knowledge insufficient, or no longer appropriate. Over much of the developing world the availability of fuelwood and other tree products has moved from abundance to scarcity within present lifetimes.
INCOME AND EMPLOYMENT FROM FORESTRY
With their focus on meeting such essential needs as fuel, food, shade and shelter, most forestry for local community development programmes give little attention to the potential for generating employment and income. However, this can be one of the most important contributions of the forest sector to the rural economy, particularly in areas such as those in which watershed management is important, where the opportunities for agricultural growth are restricted and there are few economic resources other than forests.
Production of carpentry and of wood crafts, alone constitute one of the two or three largest rural manufacturing sectors in most countries (FAO, forthcoming). Fuelwood collection, distribution and sale has become another major source of rural employment and income. In addition to wood there is a long list of materials -- seeds, fruit, leaves, plants and wild animals -- which are collected from the forest for sale, and of incomegenerating activities such as honey and tasar silk production which can be carried out in the forest. Development of employment and income opportunities requires more attention than it has usually received so far.
The bulk of forest-based employment is in household and small enterprises providing goods and services for the rural population and inputs and services to agriculture, which therefore contribute not only to rural income and employment but also to agricultural development. The relatively large size of wood products activities in the rural manufacturing total reflects the importance of furniture, builders' woodwork, agricultural implements, wooden vehicle parts, etc., in rural nonfood demand. The dominance of very small scales of production in total forest product output reflects such factors a s dispersed markets, high transportation costs, the ease with which skills can be acquired through apprenticeship or other on-the-job systems, and the ability to meet expected quality levels through simple techniques and processes. Unfortunately, in many countries policies designed to encourage industrial activity are directed more towards the large modern enterprise sector than to small traditional units. The latter consequently often face difficulties in, for example, getting access to credit on appropriate terms.
Employment and income through the gathering and distribution of forest products face other impediments, largely of an institutional nature. Little of the value accrues to the producer/gatherers, who are seldom organized sufficiently to be able to negotiate competitively either with buyers or with those controlling access to the raw material. Similar weaknesses apply to the cultivation of many of the nonwood forest products -- lac, raw silk, mushrooms, rattan, etc, All also tend to suffer from lack of research, extension support and market development.
Most measures required to remove these constraints must originate outside the forest sector in areas such as credit policy. Many countries have recently introduced changes in order to encourage small rural enterprise activities. There are, however, some forms of support which could be initiated from within the sector, for example, to ensure equitable access to supplies of wood. Training is another area where assistance might be provided (FAO, forthcoming).
The potential for expanding income from such products through strengthened institutional arrangements and support services is illustrated by the Korean experience. Generation of income was an important component of the village forestry programme. To this end several commercial activities were included, such as mushroom growing and fibre production, which could be combined with tree growing. Production and marketing of these products took place through the Korean Federation of Forestry Association Unions, the national body serving all VFAs. By centralizing negotiations with the buyers, and by setting production targets, the Federation stabilized prices, greatly increasing incomes to the members of the constituent VFAs. During the 1970s export income alone from such products as mushrooms, kudzu fibre for wallpaper, bark and resins rose more than one hundred-fold to more than US$ 100 million a year flowing to the participating village cooperatives (Gregersen, 1982).
Even at the individual farmer level it is important that tree growing produce tangible shortterm economic benefits. For the poor, the need to give priority to meeting present rather than future needs is evident. Nearly everywhere the trees people choose to grow are those that start to produce fruits, fodder, gums and other outputs of saleable or own-use value early after planting, in addition to the wood produced later in the production cycle. Wood in fact is usually a co-product, and often only a by-product, of other products of trees on a farm or in a village.
In recent years there has also been a widespread growth in markets for the wood products of trees grown by farmers. Shortages of round timber of the size and quality needed for house building and other construction emerge early in the process of degradation and destruction of existing forest and woodland, so that people have to increasingly purchase building poles. In large towns and cities, urban populations depending on wood fuels for cooking and heating cause a rapid expansion in commercial demand for fuelwood and charcoal.
As supplies from destructive cutting of nearby existing tree resources decrease, demand is increasingly met by the production locally of fast growing pole and fuelwood species. The magnitudes involved can be very large. In the State of Gujarat, in India, the growth in private planting to provide poles, and fuelwood, has been explosive. Starting only a few years ago, the production of seedlings for farmers had risen by 1983-1984 to nearly 200 million a year.
Small farmer production of wood as a cash crop has not been confined just to poles and fuelwood. In the Philippines more than 4,000 farmers grow Albizzia falcataria for sale as pulpwood. In northern India farmers grow ecualypts for sale as pulpwood and veneer logs. In the Sudan, Acacia senegal has been grown as a farm crop to produce gum arabic, a principal source of export revenue for the country, for hundreds of years. Match stock, tannin bark and a variety of fruits, oils and nuts are other industrial raw materials produced from forest trees grown by smallholders.
The emerging importance of the growing of trees as a cash crop is focusing attention on a number of issues. One is the matter of how much production can markets absorb at price levels which would yield the farmers an acceptable return. Shifts in land use practices towards tree growing on the scale being witnessed in Gujarat are also raising issues of crop and labour displacement (Foley and Barnard, 1984).
In some cases, farmers may need help in gaining access to markets and credit in order to take advantage of market opportunities. The smallholder production of pulpwood in the Philippines, for example, rests on contractual assurances about prices and about the willingness of the pulp company to purchase farmer production, availability of credit and assistance provided to the farmers in securing title to their land -- a necessary prerequisite for obtaining credit (Hyman, 1983).
The process of commercialization of previously predominantly subsistence tree outputs such as fuelwood is clearly spreading from towns into rural areas. The growing of trees in response to market forces is, therefore, becoming an increasingly important component of forestry for local community development programmes.
The nature and extent of government encouragement and support needed to enable people to develop and maintain community forestry activities varies widely. Not all of it is specifically directed at forestry. An upsurge in tree growing in parts of Kenya after a long period of deforestation and environmental deterioration has been ascribed as much to the impact of land reform and rural development programmes as to the specific measures of awareness raising, seedling production and extension directed at tree growing (Brokensha et al., 1983). The very intensive and comprehensive package of government interventions created to support village afforestation in Korea -- legislation, extension, subsidies, training, etc. -- was similarly inserted within a general rural development programme, the Saemaul Undong self-help movement (Gregersen, 1982).
Perhaps the most widespread need for support is provision of access to planting stock, i.e., creation of an infrastructure of nurseries to produce seedlings of suitable tree species. There are numerous instances of participatory tree growing taking root with no more stimulus than the creation locally of a nursery. Equally, relative proximity of a nursery, and of the technical advice available from nursery staff, have frequently been identified as a major factor of success or failure.
However, provision of seedlings does not necessarily have to be dependent on government. Farmers have widely secured their needs by transplanting wild seedlings, or by collecting seed from existing trees. Nursery production of seedlings is also widely being taken over. In Korea all seedlings are produced either by private sector entrepreneurs or by cooperative groups. in Gujarat, by November 1982, nearly one-third were operated by schools. Schools have widely been a focus for such work in other countries. In East Africa individual farmers have started seedling production for sale to their neighbours.
Community level afforestation is likely to face lack of information about the most appropriate species to grow them. Research is consequently another area where government support is particularly needed. The species that will best produce fuelwood are usually quite different from the species that will best produce timber or paper fibre. Trees that can be grown by a poor farmer or group of villagers will probably have quite different characteristics from trees grown in industrial plantations or state forests. Little research effort in the past has been oriented towards community forestry.
Most governments are also having to build up an extension capability to support forestry at the farm and village level, as the traditional role of forest services of managing forests on state land has not usually required forestry extension. An impediment that often arises is that past forestry policies placed forest services in a primarily protective role, that of preserving forests from what was considered to be misuse by the people. As a result, the function of the field forester has been partly that of a policeman. Understandably this has widely led to friction at the local level between forest services and the people, who see themselves being kept out of the forest in order that others may consume its produce. This makes it difficult for the forester now to be able to establish the rapport with people which is necessary if one is to be an effective extension agent.
In order to divide the policing role of government from its developmental role, many countries have created separate forest organizations, or separate branches of the latter, to handle community forestry. Others work through some form of intermediary organizations to keep developmental activities separate from policing functions. The village forestry cooperatives in Korea are a good example of such a bridge created between the forest service and the people in order to provide support to community forestry. Elsewhere religious groups, women's groups and various other forms of nongovernmental organization have contributed to the process of linking local needs and aspirations with the support available from government services.
Community forestry thus rests not only on the involvement and participation of local people, but on the readiness and ability of governments to take and implement a number of political decisions. Community forestry may require fundamental changes in the sensitive area of land ownership and control. The success of community forestry in the middle hills in Nepal stems from a willingness by that government to turn over state land to groups of local people to manage. That in Korea rested on the government being prepare d and able to legislate and enforce the setting aside of certain land for tree growing, and to empower village cooperatives to implement this radical new policy. Thus, through forestry for local community development seeks to mobilize the interests, energies and resources of the people behind tree growing, its success usually also requires political commitment to forestry by governments of a high order.
Disaggregating forestry to the level of small self-help activities which rural people can implement largely with their own resources is usually the only way in which tree cover can be maintained or inserted on a sufficient scale in populated, cultivated areas. Though such tree growing by rural people is unlikely to directly provide for the primarily protective functions that forests can play within an overall river basin system, it can play a critically important role in contributing to stable land use at the farm level, in meeting local wood product needs and in generating nonfarm employment and income -- and in so doing, in relieving pressures on the remaining forests which do provide protective cover.
Accumulating experience with forestry for local community development is showing it to be more diverse, and often more complex, than was earlier thought to be the case. The supply, and use, of trees and tree outputs are often part of complex local human and resource systems. At the same time community forestry in practice encompasses a whole range of quite different situations and activities, in which the factors influencing success or failure can vary widely. A more precise, situation-specific approach to forestry for local community development is, therefore, needed in the future.
In the first place, a clearer appreciation is needed of the contribution of forestry activities other than afforestation. The focus in recent years on local tree planting has clearly been in response to growing awareness of the importance and magnitude of people's needs for such basic materials as fuel for cooking. This understandable preoccupation has perhaps obscured the equally important role forestry and forest products play in generating income and employment and so helping people rise above a subsistence way of life. Moreover, from within the spectrum of income-generating forest-based activities those that involve the largest numbers of rural people, small wood-working enterprises and nonwood products of the forest, at present receive the least attention.
Similarly, more importance needs to be attached to existing forests. Much of the raw material base for enterprise activities comes from natural forests rather than planted trees, as do a wealth of foods, medicines and other outputs which people use in their daily lives. Much greater priority should often be given to strengthening and building upon traditional systems whereby forests are conserved and used on a sustainable basis, rather than abandoning them and resorting to plantation forests.
Within the range of situations in which new planting is appropriate, a more precise, situation-specific approach to participatory tree growing is needed. Generalizations concerning availability of land, length of production period and possession of relevant knowledge and skills as constraints to participatory tree growing need to be replaced with a more precise assessment of each individual situation. Some people are already cultivating trees and only need help in the provision of planting stock of new species and the introduction of new uses and systems. Others who are cultivating trees but are limited by growing pressure on the land need help in raising productivity. There are, however, many people who have relied on existing natural woodland or trees and have little or no experience in planting them. This is the situation which exists in many arid areas and may require a major effort of education, mobilization and support (Taylor and Soumare, 1983).
Finally, programmes need to reflect the clearer understanding that is emerging of the limits within which tree growing and other forestry activities could contribute to local development. A variety of impediments limit the access of some people to land for forestry; physical and economic factors prevent others from growing trees; and institutional restrictions exclude yet others from participation. Not everyone will be able to benefit from forests and tree growing, and it will not be possible to solve all problems associated with shortages of forest products in this way. However, not all present impediments to local participation in forestry are immutable, and an important outcome of government intervention in support of forestry for local community development can be to widen access to its benefits.
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