Forests are not just crucial for keeping the global environment stable; they are also a lifeline for hundreds of millions of the world's poor. This paper presents community forest enterprise as a possible solution, which combines both avoided deforestation (the concept of richer nations paying poorer ones to halt planned logging) and poverty reduction.
Community forestry, the author asserts, is often overlooked, yet small and medium forest enterprises (SMFEs) make up 80-90 per cent of all forest enterprises in many developing countries. Whilst many SMFEs are simply microcosms of large-scale logging businesses, they are less prone to “committee paralysis” than is often perceived and can be fertile ground for good business models. As such, the author argues, investing in them makes good sense.
The paper presents five brief case studies from Brazil, Papua New Guinea, Kenya, Mexico and Guatemala as a means of illustrating the potential of the democratic community forest model.
The key messages include:
- avoided deforestation and poverty reduction are global challenges, which large-scale industrial concessions generally fail to address, while the small and medium forest enterprises that dominate the sector have variable impacts;
- a visionary strategy for meeting these challenges is to build political support for democratic community forest enterprises;
- governments can help by investing in such enterprises, channelling scarce resources to expand secure community land and forest tenure, and removing unfair taxes, subsidies and regulations;
- investment could be channelled to facilitate the growth of community organisations into democratically run businesses, subsidise sustainable forest management, and improve links to business development and financial service providers, market information services and trade fairs.
