For millennia forests have provided local communities with food, medicine and fibres and with income from trade in these items. Only in the past few centuries has trade in timber and pulp overshadowed these various commodities. Enterprises based on non-wood forest products (NWFPs) have attracted attention for their potential to make forest use more sustainable, both because they extend the range of forest benefits and because gathering and processing activities can be managed by communities near the forest resource, with a greater portion of the end-product revenues returning to those who manage the resource. General discussions of the potential of NWFPs and their international markets have often overshadowed the actual experiences of many community based enterprises and their success stories, of which several are presented in this article.
Unasylva, the FAO publication (1999, vol. 50 (198), pp 3-8; http://www.fao.org)
