Foro Global sobre Seguridad Alimentaria y Nutrición (Foro FSN)

The impacts of forest policy and programs on risks and vulnerability for forest dependent people are considerable. Policies and programmes typically marginalise those people in favour of State or Corporate interests – often mediated through business models involving large-scale industrial forest concessions, or large-scale agricultural land allocations. However, there is little evidence that the large-scale industrial model either protects forests reduces poverty (Mayers, 2006).

Much rarer are models of investing in locally controlled forestry (ILCF) which allow local people to: (i) secure commercial resource rights; (ii) gain access to technical extension and finance; (iii) develop business capacity and market access; and (iv) strengthen organisations that allow them market power and political influence. Any forest farmer needs these four preconditions to engage in farm forestry – and would need to answer yes to the following four questions: If I plant or manage this tree / crop, will I be able to sell it? (rights); will I be able to protect it from pests and diseases and process it to market specification? (technical extension); will I be able to access markets on fair terms? (market access); will I have an organisation to defend these prior conditions during the tree / crop cycle?

Good progress is being made towards ILCF in countries such as Gambia, Guatemala, Kenya, Mexico, Nepal – but progress is painfully slow. Moreover, there is now considerable evidence that ILCF delivers better forest protection and poverty reduction than State or Corporate models (Nepstad et al. 2006; Pagdee et al., 2006; Molnar et al., 2007; Bowler et al. 2010; Persha et al., 2011; Robinson et al., 2011; Porter-Bolland et al. 2012; Seymour et al. 2014; WRI and RRI, 2014 – the list goes on…).

A valid question, therefore, is ‘why do the former sets of policies still persist’ – and the answer is probably mostly simply stated as ‘elite vested interests’. So how can such policies and vested interests be tackled or realigned with social protection for forest-dependent people? The best approach, in my view, is to strengthen the organisation of forest and farm producer groups so that they can hold government to account and break into markets. This is exactly the approach of the Forest and Farm Facility that was designed by representatives of alliances of Indigenous Peoples, community forestry and smallholder family forestry – see http://www.fao.org/partnerships/forest-farm-facility/en/ . The major sources of vulnerability for forest dependent people to my mind lie in their isolation: from each other, from markets, from service providers and from decision-makers. Alliances of supporters of small forest enterprises such as Forest Connect have sought to tackle such isolation – and are now aligned with the approach of the Forest Farm Facility based around ILCF.

So how might social protection policies be aligned with ILCF? Well, firstly there is a need to role out social insurance to support forest farm producers in times of shock. Many forest farm producer organisations already invest in this, by establishing rotating loan funds that can (i) meet critical short term cash needs for members while also (ii) preventing needs based tree cutting that threatens sustainable forest management planning.

Second, there is a need to provide social assistance to those unable to engage directly in such forest farm producer organisation (because they are ill, or in school, or landless etc). Again forest farm producer organisation almost always make such investments in social assistance within the distribution of profits from their businesses.

Third, there is a need to develop labour policies to protect forest workers (minimu wages, safety standards etc). But this is much less of an issue if the business model is based on collective ownership and profit distribution between members structured in some form of informal or formal association or cooperative. One of the best ways to provide labour assurance is to preferential support and procure from such business collectives where labour not capital drives benefit distribution.

Fourth, in terms of subsidies, there are ways of reducing the administrative costs of establishing collective forest farm producer businesses, adjusting resource tenure and taxes in their favour, reducing the cost of capital for their investment needs, subsidising inputs (seeds, fertilisers, energy costs etc)

Finally, there are ways of designing education systems (and indeed health, agricultural support etc) such that they cater for the entrepreneurial necessities of local forest farm producers – across a necessarily diverse basket of crops – that diversifies income sources and so provides security from climatic, economic and civil shocks.

In summary – the best way of aligning social protection services with forest policies and programmes is to ensure that both work directly to strengthen the organisation of forest and farm producer groups – who form the biggest forest private sector – and the one most likely to conserve forests and reduce poverty.

References

Mayers, J. (2006) Poverty reduction through commercial forestry: What evidence? What prospects? Tropical Forest Dialogue Background Paper. The Forest Dialogue, New Haven, USA.

Bowler, D., Buyung–Ali, L., Healey, J. R., Jones, J. P. G., Knight, T., and Pullin, A. S. (2010) The evidence base for community forest management as a mechanism for supplying global environmental benefits and improving local welfare: Systematic review. CEE review 08–011 (SR48). Environmental Evidence. Available at: www.environmentalevidence.org/SR48.html. Accessed 8 May 2014.

Molnar, A., Liddle, M., Bracer, C., Khare, A., White, A. and Bull, J. (2007) Community–based forest enterprises: Their status and potential in tropical countries. ITTO Technical Series No. 28, International Tropical Timber Organization, Yokohama, Japan.

Nepstad, D., Schwartzman, S., Bamberger, B., Santilli, M., Rar, D., Schlesinger, D. Lefebvre, P., Alencar, A., Prinz, E., Fiske, G. and Rolla, A. (2006) Inhibition of Amazon deforestation and fire by parks and indigenous lands. Conservation Biology 20(1): 65–73.

Pagdee, A., Kim, Y. and Daugherty, P. J. (2006) What makes community forest management successful: A meta–study from community forests throughout the world. Society and Natural Resources: An International Journal 19 (1): 33–52.

Persha, L., Agrawal, A., and Chhatre, A. (2011) Social and ecological synergy: Local rulemaking, forest livelihoods, and biodiversity conservation. Science 331 (6024): 1606–1608.

Porter–Bolland, L., Ellis, E.A., Guariguata, M.R., Ruiz–Mallen, I., Negrete–Yanelevich, S. and Reyes–Garcia, V. (2012) Community managed forests and forest protected areas: An assessment of their conservation effectiveness across the tropics. Forest Ecology and Management 268: 6–17.

Seymour F., La Vina, T. and Hite, K. (2014) Evidence linking community level tenure and forest condition: An annotated bibliography. Climate and Land Use Alliance, Washington, USA.

World Resources Institute and Rights and Resources Initiative (2014) Securing Rights, Combating Climate Change. Washington DC: World Resources Institute. Washington DC: Rights and Resources Initiative. Available at: http://www.rightsandresources.org/publication/securing-rights-combating-... .

 

Greetings from SAFWCO Foundation (www.safwcofoundation.org)!

Role of Social Protections towards Disaster Risk Reduction-DRR

Social protection in general and home-grown safety nets, built on resilient livelihoods that inter alia support food, nutrition and health security contribute a lot towards Community-based Disater Risk Manahement (CBDRM).

At the same time new social protection tools like cash transfers for reestablishing livelihoods- including threatened livelihoods, because of deforestation, of forest community with the aim of supporting afforestation and thus forest-based livelihoods can help develop resilient forest communities.

Dear Nyasha Tirivayi

Please find as attachment my answers to your questions.

It is prepared as a presentation. I hope, you can use it or you invite me to the congress.

Good luck and best regards

Michael Frings

Social Protection to Enhance the Resilience of Forest-Dependent Peoples

I am happy to see that this very timely subject is up for discussion, for it is an attempt to preserve a rapidly vanishing element of human cultural diversity, and more importantly, an effort towards letting people live in the way they wish.

There is no doubt that a holistic mechanism of social protection is essential to enable the forest-dependent peoples to lead their lives in the most satisfactory way according to their own norms. This is because their  ability to do so is undermined by two  disruptive forces. First, owing to a variety of reasons, outside human influences are continuing to adversely affect their ability to satisfy their essential needs, and secondly, the general environmental degradation brought about by those imfluences are affecting the forests on which they depend.

Therefore, it would be reasonable to suggest that the social protection we envisage here, ought to counter the adverse effects of those two influences, and to ameliorate their consequences, which are already felt by the forest-dependent peoples.  Now, I shall try to outline a possible way forward.

I shall first discuss the possible ways of countering the direct adverse influences. The crucial  step here is to set up a sound legal and practicable mechanism to prevent any further reductions in the forest areas on which our target populations depend. Next,  it is important to legally entitle the forest-dependent people the sole right of  sustainable exploitation of the forest resources to which they ought to be entitled. This right is not to be exercised by an individual, but rather by a representative group chosen by a given population. At the same time, what constitutes sustainable forest harvesting in a given area should be ascertained by a group with reference to scientific and traditional knowledge.

For the sake of completeness, it is necessary to  establish a sound and enforceable legal mechanism to control the exploitation of any surrounding forests, which may not be used by a given population of forest-dependent people. At the same time, exploitation of the water ways through forests, locating factories or other installations whose emissions are injurious to the well-being of such forests ought to be prevented.

And finally, two moot points; first, the sensitive issue of exploiting the mineral resources which may  be found in forests, and secondly the nature of services like education, health care, etc., offered to forest-dependent peoples. I think it would be wise to place an embargo on mineral exploitation in such areas until we have evolved techniques of exploitation that are only minimally traumatic to sylvan environment. As for the services, I think the current brand of education which irrationally regards technology as an entity having an intrinsic value would be more destructive of the social fabric of forest-dependent peoples than anything else. However, if education offered everywhere is free of this 'purpose of education is to enable one to get the best paid job so that one could live a la mode d'holywood' bias, we would have no cause for concern.

Our next task is to see how to ameliorate the consequences of the adverse influences mentioned earlier. Their impact may affect nutrition, health, security (in its widest sense), etc., of those peoples. As which need is affected, and to what degree it has done so may vary widely, I shall only make some  generic suggestions here.

1. Financial and appropriate technical help to establish and operate co-operative to harvest and market forest products by forest-dependent peoples without the mediation of brokers.

2. Restrictions on what is sold to those peoples by outsiders, particularly the sale of exorbitantly priced cheap flashy goods, unhealthy food and beverages.

3. Help to engage in re-forestation of their habitat whenever indicated.

4. Graded long-term food aid compatible with their traditional diet (as much as possible) until they can achieve self-sufficiency.

5. When necessary, housing and clothing help.

6. Establishment of appropriate medical units having the relevant competence.

7. Establishment of legal, administrative, technical and financial infrastructure required to carry out the proposals made here.

I hope this may be of some use.

Cheers!

Lal Manavado.

Greetings to the contributors before me. For the first point my view are in line with that of Mr Dosse of Togo are applied to cameroon. The forest issues are cross cutting and result can only be gotten in not short term but strategies from lesson learned from other initiatives can play a big rule is absence of given force to the law. Most of the communities are usually not aware of project, even with urge amount set they can meet MDGs specifications at the local level, since most policies are set without prior lessons learned or consultation in Cameroon. For quite the 1994 forestry ‘common compass’ which is under revision for close 6 years is still be published.

Associated problems for mangrove in Cameroon equally include:

• Low  integration  of  local  communities  living  in  mangrove  areas  in  the  local  development  planning  framework.
• Lack of coherent integrated planning for economic development, sustainable use and conservation.
• Lack of tangible information and dialogue amongst stakeholders.
• Lack of capacity  to  scale-up  community-based  approaches  to  sustainable  use  and  management.
• Legal and policy reform. There  is  currently  no  legal  and  policy  framework  that  would facilitate  the  management  of  the  mangrove  special  ecosystem
• Lack  of  alternative  economic  development  opportunities  other  than  fisheries,  fish  smoking and  harvesting  of  mangrove  resources.

Dear participants

This week we will try and focus on the role of social protection instruments in forestry.

You may wish to consider discussing the third question:

Which countries have social protection instruments and programmes that:

• target forest-dependent people?
• are implemented with the aim of promoting sustainable forestry among the poor?
• are integrated with sustainable forest management programmes?

Tips: Give information on social protection need, social protection program objectives, design, target group and effectiveness regarding resilience.

I would like to draw your attention to a background document on social protection. Among the discussion documents on the top right corner of this webpage is a background document that introduces and defines social protection and the key instruments such as cash transfers, food assistance/aid, school feeding, subsidies, public works etc. Some famous examples of social protection programs include the Productive Safety Net Program (public works) in Ethiopia, Opportunidades Condicational Cash Tranfer program in Mexico, Cash transfers for orphans and vulnerable children in Kenya, Bolsa Familia in Brazil, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA public works) in India and many more.

Dear participants

I would like to thank the contributors to the discussion last week. The discussion covered a lot of interesting issues. Most of you focused on the first two questions. Here is a summary of some of your contributions:

The impacts of forest policy and programs on risks and vulnerability

• Forests provide productive benefits like wood, non-timber forest products, medicinal plants, environmental protection through air purification and habitats for animas, environmental and climate regulation through water purification and aspects like photosynthesis
• Forests are places of entertainment and tourism
• Forests provide protection against soil erosion.
• Forests have capital value as growing stock
• They prevent  climate change and biodiversity loss
• They prevent indoor diseases for women and children
• Forest products alleviate hunger and economic benefits reduce poverty
• The impacts of forests and forest policies are mediated by taxes, terms of forest concessions, relative market prices between agricultural and wood products and fossil and forest fuels , controlled transportation of forest goods, land and tree tenure insecurity, income inequality, tariff and non-tariff barriers to international trade, international environmental agreements, investment incentives, market infrastructure, agricultural sector strategies and macro-economic policies

The major sources of vulnerability for forest dependent people

• Increased population pressure on forests
• Forest degradation from agriculture, human settlement and infrastructural development
• Tragedy of the commons leading to overexploitation
• Used as a risk coping strategy or informal insurance such that they are sold or degraded in response to risks and vulnerability
• Poverty and climate change

Policy considerations

• Long term planning of policies while considering the needs of forest dependent people e.g. wellbeing, culture, their assets, displacement
• Enforce tree protection laws
• Incorporate more technology into forest management and raise awareness among forest dependent people
• Raise awareness and engage citizens for forest protection e,g, village groups, modern cooking fuels for women.
• Consider forest dependent people as experts in forest management, medicinal plants

Dear All,

Forest people are unaware of e-developments in the society as we understand almost all the activities are now electronic transaction based, since they are yet to get familiarise with it are vulnerable in this area. However, unless we give them importance with regard to tree knowledge, medicinal plants, indigenous medicines for many diseases, consider and treat them as experts, they will not be confident in dealing with the problems associated with development.     

1-) Forests protection addresses many social problems like climate change, indoor diseases for women and children, deforestation, biodiversity loss, poverty, hunger.

2-) The limitation of forests policies is financial and people mental positive change. Technology and forests protection education are important.

3-) In Togo trees protection laws exists but are not functional. In Canada yes.

4-) The conflicts is poverty, politics, climate change ignorance, absence of technology.

5-)  Awareness raising programme, citizen engagement for forest protection. Village groups to protect forests, laws, modern cooking system using by women and girls. Local governments must be responsible for forests protection projects.

Dear sir,

my view on the issues of forest dependent people would be that before taking any developemental activity in such areas we have to think for long term prespectives. Because these people are living since ages in the forest and they have huge history of local knowledge by which these forest are still intact. We have been putting efforts since centuries for development and inculcating the habit of living on partialy artificial world. But fact is that natural system which is being maintained by locals is protecting us from many natural and manmade hazards. Therefore, when we take the policy decision on expanding developmental activities in the reserve areas we have to make longterm and broad planining. Thus following points may be kept in mind:

1. What will be the effect on the local people in the forest areas

2. How their culture/ rituals can be protected

3. What alternative we are going to provide so that they can protect the assets created for conservation

4. What will be the future of this generation who are being prohibited or displaced.