The recent broadening of the objectives of forest management to increase the contribution of forestry to rural development has had profound implications for many aspects of the practice of forestry, but especially for the relationship between forest services and the rural people. Traditionally, foresters have had only limited contacts with other people. Forest products were consumed at one remove, as the processed or manufactured outputs of industry. Entry into the forest was resisted because it posed potential conflicts with the protective values of the forest. What contact foresters did have with people was thus all too often of a policing rather than supportive nature.
If forests are now expected to contribute more widely and effectively to meeting the needs of the rural poor, forest services must work with people. Local populations must be encouraged and assisted to participate as widely as possible in production activities in the forest. Forestry must reach out to the much larger numbers of people inside and outside the forest who still depend upon the products of forest trees in their daily life. The task of forestry is no longer confined to the growing of trees on forest land; equally important is to make available to others the knowledge and inputs necessary to enable them to participate in growing trees on their land.
Extension is thus fast becoming one of the priorities of forestry programmes. Extension helps people decide how best to help themselves and places the necessary skills at their disposal. Equally importantly, it enables those providing such services to learn what people really need, feel and aspire to.
Extension requires new skills and organizational structures - skills in communication, training and management, geared to the needs of people rather than to those of bureaucracy. This reality presents many challenges to forest services, which must now look to the experience gained in other fields.
This issue of Unasylva reports on how one forest service, that of Nepal, built up a forestry extension capability. In order to make such experience available as widely as possible, FAO in 1982 organized a seminar on forestry extension, held in Indonesia, at which the forest services and extension specialists of several countries pooled their experience. This store of knowledge has provided valuable inputs into the preparation of a manual on forestry extension, which is now nearing completion. Other teaching materials for forestry extension have already been prepared and made available in the form of film-strips recording actual achievements in different parts of the world.
FAO is also helping countries revise forestry teaching curricula in order to incorporate the social awareness and skills essential for communication and extension. This task is perhaps the most important of all, as it reaches beyond the immediate needs of extension to the very heart of the changes that are taking place in forestry. The idea that it exists to help people must permeate all of forestry. The task of serving people through forestry cannot be confined to just one segment of the forestry structure labelled "extension"; rather, it must motivate and guide everything we do.
