L.F. Riley, Coordinator IUFRO/SPDC1
c/o Federal Forest Research Station
Seckendorff-Gudent-Weg 8
A-1131 Vienna, Austria
IUFRO is an international, non-governmental, non-profit organization established in 1892. Its objectives are to promote international cooperation in forestry and forest products research and the standardization of research techniques. IUFRO includes more than 15,000 scientists from over 700 member organisations in some 110 countries.
In 1983 IUFRO established a “Special Programme for Developing Countries” (SPDC) at the request of the international donor community following a declaration of the XVII IUFRO World Congress in Kyoto, Japan in 1981. The aims of the SPDC are to promote the improvement of forestry research in developing countries, to facilitate information flow to forest scientists, and to marshall funds to implement a programme of general assistance to forestry research agencies and institutions in developing countries2.
SPDC is meeting its objectives through a variety of donor-supported activities including training courses, research planning workshops, seminars, information services, liaison and collaboration. Examples of recent activities to which the SPDC has contributed, include a seven-week course in basic statistics at Ossiach, Austria and a workshop on forestry and agroforestry policy research issues held in Washington D.C., U.S.A. The SPDC also issues an Information Bulletin for Developing Countries.
SPDC has, in collaboration with FAO, organized a number of regional research planning workshops. For Asia a research planning workshop was held in Kandy, Sri Lanka in 1984 on “Increasing Productivity of Multipurpose Tree Species”. A second research planning workshop entitled, “Increasing Productivity of Multipurpose Lands”, was held in 1986 in Nairobi, Kenya; in 1987, a follow-up meeting to this workshop, focussed on tree improvement and silvo-pastoral management in Sahelian and North Sudanian Africa, was held to further help develop sound research programmes for the region. In addition, the miombo and savanna woodlands of east-central and southern Africa were covered by a sub-regional workshop for the SADCC countries held in Lilongwe, Malawi, in 1988. Finally, a research planning workshop for Tropical America was organized in Huaraz, Peru in 1987, this was entitled “The Role of Multipurpose Tree Species in the Life of Rural Communities”.
As a follow-up to the regional research planning workshops, SPDC has actively contributed to the preparation of regional research projects. One example is the Regional Project on Forest Genetic Resources in the Sahel, coordinated by FAO in corporation with CILSS (the Inter-State Committee for the Fight against Drought in the Sahel), which is a direct follow-up to the African Regional workshops3.
For further information on the SPDC please contact the author of this article.
1 Manuscript received 16 April 1992.
2 See Forest genetic Resources Information no. 12 (1983) & no. 15 (1987).
