Rattan harvesting
and replanting regulations
in the Philippines: the
challenge of managing rattan
resources sustainably

F.O. Tesoro

Florentino Tesoro is Director, Forest
Products Research and Development
Institute, Laguna, the Philippines.

In the Philippines, the utilization of rattan cutting areas is governed through bids, harvesting, annual allowable cuts and the imposition of a special rattan deposit. Individual rattan gatherers, cooperatives, associations, corporations, partnerships, indigenous communities and owners or operators of rattan processing plants are qualified to bid. However, indigenous communities have priority over other applicants in areas within their ancestral domain. Licences have a maximum duration of ten years.

However, the limited tenure of the rattan-cutting licence does not provide an incentive for the licensee to manage the rattan resource sustainably. Neither does the imposition of an allowable cut guarantee a sustainably managed resource. The tendency is to gather as much as possible without regard to the succeeding harvest after the ten-year licence period.

To remove this constraint, it has been ruled to transfer all rattan-cutting licensees within community-based forest management (CBFM) areas to the jurisdiction and management of CBFM people's organizations or indigenous communities. These communities have a 25-year tenure over the area, which is renewable for another 25 years. The long tenure and the benefits that communities derive are incentives for them to manage the resources sustainably. The new arrangement also permits upland communities to profit from the rattan resources in their areas.

Other measures intended to ensure sustainability are a prescribed annual cut and a replanting requirement for rattan licensees. To ensure replanting, licensees must leave a special deposit for every linear metre gathered - 0.57 pesos (US$0.012) for canes of 2 cm diameter or more and 0.46 pesos (US$0.010) for canes of less than 2 cm diameter. The licensee may use the deposit to contract the services of private parties or government entities to establish plantations.

However, the special rattan deposit does not guarantee that plantations will be developed within the cutting area or elsewhere unless it is strictly imposed that licences are terminated if planting is not undertaken in any given year. As it is, only limited plantations have been developed with the deposit. In one region, the rattan special deposit collected since 1991 now amounts to more than 25 million pesos (US$530 000), but no plantation has been developed.

A more effective alternative to the rattan special deposit might be to require licensees to submit a plantation development plan, to show that an amount equivalent to one year's expenditure for plantation development has been deposited in a bank and to give evidence that a contract has been entered into with a third party for the development of a plantation. Plantation development should be monitored and no rattan-cutting licensee should be allowed to operate in the succeeding year if the planned plantation has not become operational.