2. What do we know about the contribution of forest resources to livelihoods and poverty reduction? Some facts and figures

2.1. The types of livelihoods inputs from forestry

Forests are important natural capital. Past development efforts have primarily focused on building natural capital, however. Equal attention has not been paid to how such as forests are used in combination with other natural assets and other livelihood assets to sustain livelihoods. This has resulted in gaps in our understanding of the contribution of forest products to sustainable livelihoods and thus poverty reduction (DFID, 1999). The three dimensions of poverty mentioned in section 1 and captured in the sustainable livelihood approach provide a useful way to assess the role of forestry in poverty alleviation, to which we now turn.

Securing subsistence needs

Forest and tree stocks provide a reserve upon which people can fall back for subsistence and income, especially in times of crop failure, unemployment and other kinds of hardship, or to meet exceptional needs. Forest and tree foods are most extensively used to help meet dietary shortfalls during particular seasons in the year. Energy-rich tree foods such as roots, tubers, leaves, rhizomes and nuts are especially important during emergency periods such as floods, famines, droughts and wars.

In addition to food, forests and trees outside forests play often a significant role in meeting the needs of the rural poor, including those related to shelter (building material) and health (medicinal plants).

Increased income

Although income criteria of poverty when used alone may be criticised, it is recognised that people seek to increase the amount of money coming into the household. Increased income also relates to the idea of economic sustainability of the household. Forest role in increasing income opportunities can come in different guises (Warner, 2000):

Through employment in formal forest industries, and more importantly, in small informal forest-related businesses [1];

As a complement to other sources of income (mainly farm income) [2], and for several forest products, often on a part-time basis and along seasonal patterns. );

Indirectly, as a source of inputs for non-forest income-generating products (e.g. source of fertility for agricultural products or fodder for livestock).

Flexibility of income from forest/tree products is a positive feature for the rural poor. Income generation can be either “lumpy” (e.g. through sales of mature trees planted at the period), as an opportunity for investment in building up assets); or staggered (e.g. fruit trees) which helps in making ends meet and/or fulfilling social obligations.

Better access to capital assets / more bargaining power

Although crucial to meeting subsistence needs and increasing income, the political dimension of poverty reduction has only recently been tentatively addressed in the livelihoods approach. Its importance for the poor can be illustrated by the fact that in many instances, rural people place more importance in controlling access to what they see as the forest resources key to their livelihoods than to trade this for more income from these resources, e.g. in Tanzania (Wily, 2000) or India (Sahrin, 2001). Denying access to natural capital alone can significantly deteriorate the status of those who are already worse off and therefore rely more heavily on forest resources, as illustrated from an example in Thailand - see Box 3.

Box 3: Impact of Forest Closure on the Poor

In Thailand the government tried to conserve a forest by ‘closing it off’ in 1990. This caused major changes in the access to food for the villagers as they used the forest both directly for foods and indirectly as a source of income. The most vulnerable group to increased food insecurity due to the forest closing were the extremely poor households whose rice production was insufficient for up to 10-12 months per year. These households were landless, lacked animals, and were reliant on work as day labourers. Income generation projects focused on animals and so the food insecure households were not able to benefit.

Kunarattanapruk, Chokkianapitak, and Saowakontha 1995

2.2. Different patterns of the people/forest relationship

Tens of millions of people depend on forests, and the contribution of forest resources to their livelihoods can come in different guises, summarised in Box 4.

Box 4: What do poor people get from trees and forests?

Subsistence goods such as fuelwood, medicines, wood for building, rope, bush meat, fodder, mushrooms, honey, edible leaves, roots, fruits

Goods for sale all of the above goods, arts and crafts, timber and other wood products

Income from employment, both in the formal and the informal sectors

Indirect benefits such as land for other uses, social and spiritual sites, environmental services, including watershed protection and biodiversity conservation

Source: FAO/DFID, 2001

However, it is difficult to be very precise about the proportion of poor depending on forest resources because “dependence” can vary according to circumstances and how livelihood patterns evolve over time. Qualitatively speaking however, there is a general agreement about the categories of forest dependence proposed by Byron and Arnold (1999) and Sunderlin et al (2002), i.e.

Forest dwellers, including hunter-gatherers and swidden cultivators;

Farmers living next to forests, who use forests as a complement to livelihood diversification (includes the landless);

Commercial users, including small producers, traders and employees;

Consumers of forest products among the urban poor.

The following comments can be made on these categories:

They have been well developed and rationalised for forests, but if the intention is to include those who rely on trees as a whole, then these categories are too forest specific. The 1.2 billion people mentioned in the World Bank statistics (see Table 1 further) would not fit into any of these categories. Many of those practising agroforestry, or in extensive parkland systems have often little or no interaction with forests. In fact intensification of agroforestry systems in some areas is a direct result of lack of access (e.g. change in legislation, distance) to forests.

These categories are not mutually exclusive. However, it is often convenient to use to make the distinction between two broad categories of “poor”, i.e. the ‘very poor’, who use forest resources mainly as a safety net and the ‘less poor’ who have the opportunity to use forest and tree resources beyond meeting their subsistence needs, i.e. as sources of income. It is important to note that these two categories of poor often compete for the local forest resources, e.g. the wealthier may wish to convert forest used as source of food and medicine by the poorest of the poor into agricultural plots. On the other hand, though the wealthier in a community, with more resources to devote to forest product gathering and production, are often the heaviest users, the poor usually derive a greater share of their overall needs from forest products and activities. Therefore, any significant reduction in the local forest and tree capital affects primarily the poorest section of the population (DFID et al, 2002).

Although the distinction between different categories of poor and their relationships to forests is useful it sometimes leads to an exclusive focus on these categories when it comes to tackling poverty through forestry. In doing so, it overlooks key players in the way forestry contributes or not to poverty reduction, such as forestry staff and middlemen. These stakeholders often put pressure on and/or provide valuable services to both categories of poor defined above to satisfy their own needs. Thus, ways and means to address these must be sought when working on forest-based poverty reduction (FBPR). More broadly, this is just one illustration that FBFR will only work if the livelihoods and concerns of the ‘non-poor’ forest stakeholders, and their formal and informal interactions with the poor are also taken into consideration.

2.2. Some figures

Despite the difficulties in characterising “dependence” mentioned in the previous section, an array of figures has been recently produced, aiming at illustrating the magnitude of the linkages between the poor and forestry, and especially the amount of poor dependent on forest resources for their livelihoods. Table 1 summarises some of the more prominent information in that respect.

Table 1: Some figures illustrating people and poor’s dependency on forests and trees

Figures

Sources

(i) People’s dependency on forests and trees

1.6. billion people in the world rely heavily on forest resources for their livelihoods, of which:

60 million indigenous people living in the rainforests of Latin America, Southeast Asia and West Africa depend heavily on forests.
350 million people living in, or next to, dense forests rely on them for subsistence or income.
1.2 billion people in developing countries use trees on farms to generate food and cash.

More than 2 billion people rely on biomass fuels (mainly fuelwood) for cooking and heating

Forestry provides more than 10 million real jobs in developing countries; to which one should add between 30 and 50 million informal jobs in the wood industry

Natural products (many from forests) are the only source of medicine for
75-90% of people in developing countries

(ii) Poor’s dependency on forests and trees

One out of four of the world’s poor depend directly or indirectly on forests for their livelihood

World Bank, 2001b

UNDP, UNDESA and World Energy Council, 2000

Poschen, 2002; ILO, 2002

FAO, 1996

World Bank, 2000

These figures call for some comments:

Those related to dependence on trees are much larger than those related to forest resources alone. This is just another indication of one point that this paper tries to make clear, i.e. the importance of “getting out of the forest box” and having a landscape perspective on forests when it comes to their linkages with poverty reduction;

Most figures concern the relationship between forests and (usually rural) people, not that between forests and ‘the poor’. Thus, they include the less poor rural people who also use forest resources. This reflects a general trend in the documentation available on the subject.

The above it reflects the complexity of the forestry-poverty problematic, not least the difficulty to grapple with the key aspect of informal processes and structures in a systematic fashion, and the figures on employment are but one illustration of how important informal processes are in the livelihoods of the poor.