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PENEWS 2009-2 (August): Introducing RAVA: The Amazon Livelihood and Environment Network CONTENT:
The Amazon Livelihood and Environment Network (RAVA) The Amazon Livelihood and Environment Network (known as ‘RAVA’, its Spanish acronym), was formed in 2007 by the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) and other partner institutions within the Amazon Initiative (AI) Consortium (including CIFOR). Using the PEN methodology, RAVA analyses the living conditions of Amazonian communities to gain a better understanding of the impact of forestry, agroforestry and agricultural activities on the wellbeing of the communities and on the integrity of their surrounding environment. RAVA studies have been carried out across 14 sites in seven Amazonian countries, with each study location consisting of a well-defined territory equivalent to one or more districts, or to an Amazonian river basin home to communities that depend directly on the forest and its products. In each RAVA site, a small research team typically includes a professor from a local university, a postgraduate student, and a researcher or technician from a local institution. To date, researchers have finished collecting data in five of the seven countries, with site visits still occurring in Venezuela and Suriname. A database comprising information from a total of 2200 households in almost 150 communities is currently being assembled through the integration of data from the 14 surveys. In the coming months, RAVA teams will be checking and cleaning the data already gathered and entered. There are plans to produce an edited volume about RAVA research, as well as publications aimed at sharing useful study results with the subject communities themselves. RAVA receives financial support from the World Bank’s Institutional Development Fund, with in-kind co-financing from ICRAF, CIFOR and other AI member institutions. RAVA is also working closely with PEN: RAVA is using an expanded PEN questionnaire, a common code list is maintained, and two studies collect data for both projects. PEN Fellow Ronnie Babigumira was the resource person for the third RAVA workshop in May 2009 (Belém, Brazil), and the teams are now receiving online training in STATA through modular sessions Read the full story here: www.cifor.cgiar.org/pen/_ref/news/rava-brazil.htm PEN project: Riyong Kim Bakkegaard (DRC): Forest and environmental income surrounding Luki Biosphere Reserve in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
The PEN Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) study was conducted in the lowland rainforest area surrounding Luki Biosphere Reserve, Bas-Congo Province in western DRC. The reserve is located approximately 120 km from the Atlantic coast and covers 32 968 hectares. Five villages surrounding the reserve were surveyed, and 193 households completed the year-long PEN survey in September 2008. Forest income contributes 28 per cent of household income, which varies between income quintiles and seasons. As expected, forest dependence (or relative forest income (RFI) as measured by the proportion of forest income over total income) decreased as total income increased, although absolute forest income was higher for higher income quintiles (Figure 1).  Figure 1. RFI and income quintiles, DRC 2007–08 Forest and environmental income ranked as the biggest contributor to household income, followed by agricultural income, although there were marked differences between income quintiles. Lower income quintiles had higher forest and environmental income than crop income, but this pattern was reversed in the upper income quintiles. Business was also a significant income contributor in general, frequently reflecting the production of a cassava product, chikuangue, traded in the capital, Kinshasa. In terms of seasonality, the contribution of forest income was higher during the wet season—reflecting the lean period, when the rains promote a shift to intensive planting of agricultural crops. During this period, forest products are in abundance and can be cashed in for other products such as petrol and rice. A familiar pattern emerges when looking at products used for subsistence or cash—subsistence use of products was greater among lower quintiles, than among higher quintiles (Figure 2). This is also shown in the literature, as richer quintiles could have better access to resources such as labour and money to buy harvesting technologies, networks to market collected products, or crops which allow them to then harvest products that fetch a greater cash value (or a combination of these).  Figure 2. Cash and subsistence (sub) shares by income quintile, DRC 2007–2008 The forest product most collected was by far firewood (39%), followed by bush meat (16%) and charcoal (11%). The proportion of firewood in total forest income was higher among lower quintiles and not surprisingly 98% of it was used mainly for subsistence. In general, a diversity of products was collected, from palm nut (Elaeis guineensis) for the production of palm oil, to caterpillars, to eru (Gnetum africanum) for sale to Kinshasa, with a greater diversity of products collected by higher income quintiles (likely reflecting the better access to resources that allows them to exploit more products). This diversity and resource dependence is hardly surprising as the country is rich in natural resources, housing the largest of Africa’s forests. Nevertheless, DRC remains a land of ongoing conflict. Thirty years of political mismanagement, two civil wars and continuing ethnic unrest and human rights abuses in the eastern provinces has affected DRC as a country, leaving its infrastructure, institutions and services seriously wanting. The physical bottlenecks and unstable investment climate has deterred the rate of natural resource exploitation, which has helped keep DRC’s huge expanse of rainforest largely intact. However, these conditions have also meant that the majority of people living in DRC continue to live in poverty and to rely heavily on natural resources around them for their survival. Good reading: Poverty, environmental income and rural inequality From two of the intellectual godfathers of PEN, we bring you: Poverty, environmental income and rural inequality: A case study from Zimbabwe, by William Cavendish and Bruce Campbell. Although not (yet) published in a peer-reviewed journal, this paper is a treasure trove of information and inspiration for PEN partners and others working on the forest–poverty nexus. Using a 213 household data set from rural Zimbabwe, the authors quantitatively analysed the impact of environmental income on household welfare and inequality. The paper goes beyond the standard methods, and uses a wide range of inequality measures. The authors conclude that environmental income has a substantial equalising effect on income distribution, and failure to account for this income will lead to exaggeration of rural inequality. The paper also provides clear definitions of consumption, income, poverty and inequality as used in the study. Many studies fail to do this, making their relevance hard to determine or comparisons with other studies problematic. Can an activity both have a pro-poor profile and also be a pathway out of poverty? No, the authors suggest. Enrichment activities have high entry barriers (upfront costs), which create rents (extra profit). But these barriers make them outside the reach of the asset-constrained poor. The poor have access only to activities with low entry costs, but due to the ease of access and the associated competition, profit margins are minimal. How to break this vicious circle is a key to poverty reduction, and many poor are still looking for that key. The full article is available at: PENroach: Capture it: A few screen capture solutions
A colleague was preparing a PowerPoint presentation and needed to insert figures and charts from a number of digital sources—PDFs and web pages—so she stopped by for some help. We found a solution but it got me thinking that this may be something readers of PENews may find useful. For most cases (e.g. photos on a webpage), right click and Save As will do; however, there are slightly complicated cases such as extracting charts from PDFs, and taking a snapshot of a webpage. Here are a few solutions (mostly MS Windows based and not exhaustive by any means).
If you know of any other good tools, please email us and let us know. Arild Angelsen, PEN coordinator
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Windows Print Screen Key (Prt Scr) takes a snapshot of your PC screen
and copies it to the clipboard. You can then paste (ctrl+v) it wherever you
want. Easy, no installation required, but it grabs everything on the screen,
so you will need an image editor to crop what you need.
Adobe’s snapshot tool. If the content is in a PDF, use Adobe’s
snapshot tool to select a screen area and take a snapshot of it. Like Prt
Scr it saves to the clipboard.  |