For hundreds of millions of the world’s poor, forests and forest products are essential for daily survival. During sickness, drought or famine, forests are an important safety net. Forest products provide food and revenue for households when harvests are lean.

For example, in Maranhao, Brazil, extracting babacu palm kernels is the single most important source of income for women and helps support over 300,000 families. In many counties, medicinal products from the forest are an important defense against sickness for rural families that lack access to formal health care systems.

By restoring soil fertility, forest cover serves a vital role in replenishing agricultural lands and in providing indispensable ecological services such as watershed protection for marginalized rural people.

Forests can also serve as an employer of last resort for the economically marginalised and have repeatedly acted as a refuge for less powerful people fleeing oppression.

Forest policy

Good forest policy is essential in ensuring forests continue to provide crucial assistance to people in impoverished circumstances. Unfortunately, most forest policies pay insufficient attention to such primary human needs as employment, education, social services and land rights. For example, the well-intentioned policy of closing forests in Nepal to save them from over-exploitation actually ended up hurting charcoal makers who traditionally depended on forests for their livelihood.

Research and policy improvements are necessary in the areas of:

• Forest resource access
• Land, forest and tree tenure
• Marketing
• Public-private partnerships
• Industrial forestry
• Payments for environmental services
• Community forestry.

This will help ensure that forest management and usage does not adversely affect the livelihoods of rural people.

Many countries are increasingly recognizing the importance and potential of community forest ownership. If developed properly, this will give rural people more opportunity to benefit from forest resources. The challenge then is to ensure communities implement sustainable and equitable forest management policies.

CIFOR’s focus

CIFOR works to better understand and highlight the needs of the millions of poor people around the world who depend on forests for their livelihoods and survival. It is working on ways to increase the participation of local users in forest management and thus increase the benefits flowing to them. CIFOR is also involved in research which examines how forest communities can better earn money by cultivating trees and developing income-generating opportunities using forest products.