FAO's field programme: The first 40 years

Maharaj K. Muthoo

Maharaj K. Muthoo is Director of the Operations Service, FAO Forestry Department, Rome.

· In 1953, only 32 years ago, FAO's field programme in forestry - which was then known as the Technical Assistance Programme - amounted to less than US$1 million a year. Fewer than 50 experts were employed in the field; in fact, the programme involved only about 30 work-years per year of fieldwork.

Today, the total value of FAO's field projects in forestry exceeds $180 million. More than 300 forestry-related FAO projects funded from extra-budgetary resources (for example, the United Nations Development Programme and Trust Funds) as well as from those of the Regular Programme (through the Technical Cooperation Programme) are in operation, with a foreign annual expenditure component of over $35 million managed by FAO. Projects are in operation in nearly every developing country in the world, covering areas as diverse as forest resource assessment and management, desertification control, rural development, improvement of fuelwood supplies, institutional strengthening, planning, appropriate forest industries, community forestry, watershed improvement and environmental management. In all, forestry projects now involve around 300 work-years per year of fieldwork.

Early beginnings. For the first 15 years of its existence, FAO's budget for field operations was somewhat lower than its Regular Programme expenditure. Field programmes were funded almost entirely from the UN Expanded Technical Assistance Programme (ETAP), and very occasionally by a Trust Fund donor. Field operations consisted essentially of advisory technical assistance missions and the granting of fellowships. Much of the budget was spent on demonstration and training equipment. Of the technical assistance requests received at that time from developing countries, about 60 percent were for improved forest management technologies, notably in logging and processing; about 30 percent for policy assistance; and some 1 0 percent for economic planning and resource surveys. This breakdown corresponds roughly to the structure of what was then FAO's Forestry Division, with its three branches for Forest Production, Forest Policies and Forest Economics.

However, the underlying philosophy of the forestry programme was very different from that of today. The programme was initially greatly concerned with inventory and survey, and the focus of work was on data collection. FAO's first survey of forest resources was published in 1948 and covered 97 countries. Three further world inventories were published, in 1953, 1958 and 1963. This activity, however, was not resumed on a major scale until the FAO/UNEP study of tropical forests, which was started in 1978 and completed in 1981.

The field programme was also different in style. It sought to develop forest management and forest industries in countries where there was very little, if any, of either. It is significant that in 1957, 75 percent of all forestry experts employed in the field programme were Europeans. Today, of course, the aim is to provide critical support to forest services and industries that are already established. And, increasingly, the tendency is to use forestry experts from developing countries to help their colleagues elsewhere. In fact, it is largely due to the success of earlier FAO forestry projects that technical cooperation among developing countries (TCDC) is now able to operate fairly effectively in the forestry sector.

By the end of the 1950s, the technical assistance programme in forestry had reached a value of $1 million, compared with a $0.7 million budget coming from the Regular Programme, and it employed about 60 forestry experts; the real period of growth was about to begin.

Table 1. Forestry field priorities, 1971-75

	1971		1975
Category	No. of projects	% of total	No. of projects	% of total
Forest production	56	57	42	33
Forest protection	6	6	11	9
Recreation, wildlife and national parks	4	4	18	14
Utilization of forest products	5	5	19	15
Strengthening of forestry administration	2	2	9	7
Education	16	16	17	13
Research	5	5	8	6
Not classified, or multidisciplinary	5	5	4	3
Total	99	100	128	100

Note: Some projects are covered by more than one category.

The programme takes shape. In 1959, the UN Special Fund for Economic Development (UNSF) came into being, with an annual total budget of $25 million. According to a document of that era, it placed special emphasis on "projects which will demonstrate the wealth-producing potential of un-surveyed natural resources in underdeveloped countries", as well as on national training and research centres, and on surveys of limited cost which could lead to early investment. This was a significant event. The first forestry projects funded by UNSF in 1960 had a $2.5 million budget, and this figure soon increased sharply. It reached a peak in 1966, when $14 million of the Special Fund were in the forestry budget. By 1971, 56 UNSF-assisted forestry projects were in operation, with a total contribution rising to $57 million, spread over an average project duration of four to five years. This growth, however, was not at the expense of the much smaller and shorter technical assistance projects, of which there were then 105, with a total budget of just over $5 million. Trust Fund projects had also begun to appear. By the end of 1971, 14 Trust Fund projects in forestry had been approved, with a total value of about $2 million, mainly in the fields of reforestation, logging and education.

The total value of the forestry field programme at this time reached $64 million, for some 175 projects. Over the past 14 years, the value of projects has nearly tripled, representing an average growth rate of more than 18 percent a year by value during 1971-85.

In 1970, the growth of FAO's forestry activities - it was inevitable given the requests for assistance - led to the transformation of the Forestry Division into a Forestry Department. Soon after this, ETAP and UNSF projects were merged into a single United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Former technical assistance projects became known as UNDP small-scale projects, with budgets of less than $150000, and former UNSF projects became known as UNDP large-scale projects. UNDP introduced the idea of country programming, which fixed a ceiling for multilateral aid to any individual country for a five-year period. That ceiling was directly related to a country's programme for economic and social development. This quickly led to an improved and integrated approach to development, which replaced the former project-by-project approach. The innovation was not without its problems, of course, and those in charge of mounting field projects found they had to contend with increasingly long lead times.

The first half of the 1970s was thus a period of rapid change. By 1972, there were field projects in 63 countries, a number which increased to 74 in 1975. Between 1971 and 1975, annual expenditure rose from about $12 million to $13.5 million but, more significantly, the nature of the programme also altered (Table 1). An analysis of the large-scale projects of that era is instructive: some of today's concerns are already discernible in this changing pattern. During the early 1970s, for example, decreasing attention was paid to forest production and forest protection emerged as a major activity. Requests for wildlife and national park management also increased significantly, mainly as a result of a booming tourist trade. However, this trend was not to continue. One reason was that political difficulties in Africa would soon lead to enormous depletion in many national parks. Tourist interest declined and has only recently begun to pick up again. Another reason was that in the early 1970s, before the UN Conference on the Human Environment (Stockholm. 1972), FAO was, unofficially, the leading UN agency for environmental matters. At that time, environment was widely identified with the conservation of wildlife and the preservation of national parks. Today, the term has acquired a far wider meaning, and the United Nations Environment Programme coordinates environmental action among all the specialized agencies in the United Nations system.

The most significant difference is undoubtedly the current emphasis on forestry for development.

The growing importance of strengthening forestry institutions is clear from the table, and this is a sector that has continued to grow - though today the emphasis is on Africa while formerly it was on Asia and Latin America. The largest growth sector, however, was the utilization of forest products, reflecting the beginning of a trend of major significance: about this time, the generation of employment began to be viewed as a development goal as important as increasing average per caput income - a purely statistical concept often unrelated to the life-style of the majority of a country's rural poor.

In many rural areas, forestry and, in some places, the textile industry are the only employment alternatives to subsistence agriculture. For this reason, the importance of forest resources as potential sources of jobs and extra income has steadily increased over the past few years. Increasing rural incomes and employment through the development of forest resources is now a major goal of the new forestry-for-development strategy. Table 2 shows the regional orientation of the programme during approximately the same period (current-year comparisons are also included). In the early 1970s, before the effects of the first Sahel drought became widely known, African forestry had not yet taken on the importance it has today, and the proportion of forestry projects in Africa declined slightly over the first few years of the decade. In Latin America it remained stable, largely because major new forestry institutions were already established in the early 1970s, and this partly accounts for the declining rate of projects in this region during 1975-85. It fell in Europe and the Near East, as it has continued to do ever since. But the proportion in Asia and the Pacific region grew rapidly and keeps growing to this day.

One reason for this was the emerging importance of watershed management. In many areas, but particularly in Asia, uncontrolled felling on steep land had led progressively to severe soil erosion on the hills and widespread flooding in the valleys below. Reforestation of these slopes was soon to become a main concern of the field programme. This concern, together with several other factors, led to two of the programme's major current preoccupations: community forestry and rural development.

Several other major influences also began to be felt during the second half of the 1970s. One of the most significant was the financial difficulty that struck UNDP. Although this began about 1976, it did not make itself severely felt within the forestry sector much before 1981. In 1975, UNDP was providing about $15 million a year for forestry field programmes, as against the $3 million that originated from Trust Funds. The UNDP figure continued to increase in the early 1980s, when it peaked at over $24 million, and is being maintained at around the level of $20 million, as witnessed in 1984, with a slight upward trend, despite the cut-back in overall UNDP funding. The Trust Fund programme, meanwhile, has continued to expand, rapidly building up to a figure of more than $12 million by 1984. Thanks to this, the forestry field programme has been able to constantly increase its level of support through 1981-85. In fact, the size of programme handled by the Forestry Operations Service has doubled during the decade, and its relative share of FAO's Field Programme has grown significantly.

Table 2. Forestry projects, 1971-85, by region (Extra-budgetary resources )

	1971		1974		1985
	No.	% of total	No.	% of total	No.	% of total
Africa	19	36	25	33	87	38
Asia	7	13	17	22	75	33
Europe and the Near East	11	21	12	15	27	12
Latin America	16	30	24	30	40	17
Total	53	100	78	100	229	100

The shift toward development. The most significant difference between the field programme today and its predecessor is undoubtedly the current emphasis on forestry for development. Until the late 1970s, forestry programmes had not been explicitly concerned with questions of social equity. Their goal, broadly expressed, was to stimulate the growth of the total forestry sector. Where the benefits of that growth ended up was apparently an issue considered to be either of limited importance or beyond the direct concern of the forestry profession.

Several factors intervened to bring about decisive changes in the forestry programme. The most important was probably the Declaration of Principles and Programme of Action adopted by the World Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (WCARRD), which was organized by FAO in 1979. WCARRD played a pivotal role in convincing the aid agencies that tackling the problem of poverty in developing countries could no longer be deferred, and that the main arena for that attack should be rural areas. Trust Fund donors, notably Sweden, also played a key role in formulating a new strategy of forestry for development. Even before WCARRD, Sweden had agreed to fund a new $3.6 million FAO umbrella programme called Forestry for Local Community Development. As a result of it, the field programme could come to grips with the problems of community forestry. At the same time, the true dimensions of the fuelwood crisis were also becoming known, not least because of FAO work in quantifying the issues involved. The Netherlands subsequently agreed to fund sizeable projects within another umbrella programme called Forestry and Rural Energy. Norway and Finland also joined in, by supporting social forestry projects aimed at rural development and environmental amelioration, an area in which Belgium and Switzerland are also funding FAO-executed projects.

Serious thought had, in fact, been given to many issues involved in reorienting the forestry programme toward rural development, even before WCARRD. One result was the preparation of a seminal paper, Forestry for development, which formed the basis of the new strategy of forestry for development. This strategy was endorsed at the Fifth Session of the FAO Committee on Forestry in May 1980, and subsequently by the FAO Conference. Regular Programme activities were then reorganized into four major programmes: these covered the key areas of forestry for development, forestry resources and the environment, forest industries and trade, and forestry institutions and investment.

The Forestry for Development programme includes three subprogrammes, on community forestry, fuelwood, and agrosilvipastoral systems. Each involves a number of field activities that encompass new approaches in the field programme. The most significant is probably the use of community forestry to increase local production of fuelwood, fodder, building-poles, fruit- and nuts, and other tree products. Large projects of this kind are currently in operation in Asia and Latin America, for example in Nepal and Peru, and there are many similar ones in Africa.

EROSION CONTROL IN HONDURAS a goal of many FAO projects

The community forestry component of the programme is growing in importance, and is likely to continue to do so. More than 200 million people still practice shifting cultivation; because of increasing population pressure and diminishing forest reserves, they have been forced to reduce the length of the fallow periods they formerly observed. The results are an increasing poverty and the widespread destruction of the tropical forest. FAO is searching for improved methods that will integrate agriculture and forestry and bring increased incomes and an improved environment to the affected areas. Promising projects have been carried out in both Asia and Central America.

A third major concern is increasing the incomes of rural people who live in or near the forest. Recent studies have underlined the importance of projects that improve the organization of the small-scale cooperatives which earn at least part of their living by gathering forest materials, producing honey or growing mushrooms, for instance. Projects of this kind are proving relatively quick and cheap, and their number is increasing. A typical project of this nature, in Papua New Guinea, is helping establish village-level crocodile farms; the villagers raise the crocodiles, which are not an endangered species in that part of the world, and sell their skins when the animals reach full growth. A project in Honduras, which has enabled associations of campesinos to participate in forest management, has increased incomes by as much as 400 percent.

Nearly half of FAO s field projects in forestry are concerned with forest resources and the environment. Many involve support to governments for the assessment, planning and management of forest resources - the traditional activities of the field programme. The largest project of this type, in Brazil, is already several years old. It has enabled and still does enable the country to take stock of its immense forest resources and develop and utilize them in a sustainable way.

A most important area of environmental action is undoubtedly watershed management. Action in this area typically involves large, integrated projects of which forestry forms only one component. At the end of 1984, FAO's Forestry Department was participating in 27 projects involving watershed management. One of the most complex is a regional project in the Fouta Djallon highlands of West Africa, calling for cooperation and coordination among several countries and institutions. Severe erosion is occurring in the highlands, and this disrupts the flow of rivers in the area, affecting 11 countries in all. The project is likely to lead to a number of investment projects.

Table 3. Forestry field priorities, 1984-85

	No. of projects	% of total	Value (millions of US dollars)	Share of total value (%)
Rural development	71	24	48	27
Resources and environment	127	42	83	46
Industries and trade	40	13	22	12
Investment and institutions	62	21	27	15
Total	300	100	180	100

Note: Some projects are covered by more than one category

Table 4. TCP-funded forestry field projects, 1977-84 (Costs in thousands of US dollars)

	Africa		Asia		Latin America		Europe Near East		Total
	No.	Cost	No.	Cost	No.	Cost	No.	Cost	No.	Cost
1977	3	50	5	192	9	553	4	224	21	1019
1978	2	42	6	392	5	222	3	190	16	846
1979	8	317	5	403	13	846	5	194	31	1760
1980	13	391	7	290	4	136	3	52	27	869
1981	10	490	4	107	5	4827	2	97	21	1121
1982	11	667	3	301	5	392	3	46	22	1406
1983	24	1953	10	651	6	213	3	103	43	2920
1984	9	564	11	842	10	690	5	296	35	2392
Total	80	4474	51	3178	57	3479	28	1202	216	12333

Trade and industry projects are essentially aimed at improving the use made of forest materials, notably but not exclusively in the pulp and paper industry. There is a great need for such projects, because half of the developing world's significant foreign-exchange costs are due to pulp and paper imports. Major projects in this area include an ambitious one in Bhutan designed to set up a forest industries complex capable of producing plywood and veneers, blackboard, sawn timber, joinery and furniture.

This article will deal later with forestry investment. But projects designed to strengthen national institutions deserve special mention here, because institutional weakness is still the major factor and a basic constraint preventing the satisfactory development and management of the world's forest resources. At least 50 operational projects included an institution-building component at the end of 1984. Many among them have training and education components concerning aspects of community forestry, which now requires foresters to act as extension agents in securing the participation of local people in planning and managing the development of their own forest resources.

Because Regular Programme and field programme activities are now so closely interwoven within FAO, it is convenient to analyse the changes that have occurred during this decade in the field programme in terms of the four components of the Regular Programme. Table 3 gives a graphic illustration of changing priorities.

The table shows the rather dramatic progress toward the new strategy achieved over the past five years. The Resources and Environment programme remains the largest of the four, but by far the most rapidly expanding area has been that of forestry for development. Over the past five years, the share in field programme expenditure of the four programmes has changed as follows:

· Rural Development: increased from 3 to 23 percent;
· Resources and Environment: decreased from 54 to 50 percent;
· Industries and Trade: decreased from 19 to 13 percent;
· Investment and Institutions: decreased from 24 to 14 percent.

The rapid increase in the rural development sector is largely due to support from Trust Fund donors, which overshadows the UNDP contribution in this area: about two-thirds of the costs of the Rural Development field programme are provided by Trust Funds. The situation is reversed in the other three sectors: in round terms. UNDP provides about 70 percent of support for Investments and Institutions, 80 percent for Resources and Environment, and 90 percent for Industries and Trade.

A number of other important components of the field programme merit further analysis. The first is the arrival of FAO's own Technical Cooperation Programme (TCP) in 1976, which added a new dimension to the programme. TCP now enables the forestry sector to execute quickly a number of small-scale, catalytic but crucial projects every year. These are proving especially useful in providing critical bridging support (between project phases, for example), helping in such emergencies as outbreaks of pests and tree diseases, preparing investment projects and supporting training. Since 1976-77, there have been 216 TCP forestry projects (Table 4). As might be expected, Africa had the highest regional share (80 projects), followed by Latin America and the Caribbean (57), Asia and the Pacific (51), and Europe and the Near East (28).

The UN/FAO World Food Programme (WFP), since its inception in 1963, has contributed substantial investment funds to forestry projects in the form of food for work, particularly in rural development programmes. During the period 196669, when WFP had considerable quantities of surplus food at its disposal, some 17 percent of its resources were devoted to the forestry sector. By the end of 1971, 48 WFP forestry projects had taken place, and 27, with a WFP input of $75 million, were still operational.

WFP has been active in a number of areas: forestry training and extension, land reclamation, range and watershed management, reforestation and forest conservation, village wood-lot plantations, sand dune fixation, and establishing windbreaks and green belts and fodder trees and shrubs. It is currently involved in some 85 forestry projects, with a WFP input of $207 million. Nearly half of these projects, by value, are in the Asia and Pacific region. Many of them are being carried out with technical support from FAO's Forestry Department.

Forestry investment projects have been left till last for the reason that investment projects are often the culmination of the field programme's work, much of which is of a pre-investment nature. There are many stages in forestry development, starting with forest inventories and assessments, progressing through the build-up of institutions, forestry education and training, and the testing and demonstration of new ideas for forest management and production, and culminating in the elaboration of schemes for investment follow-up. It is at this stage that individual countries begin to reap the rewards of their patient progress toward the full realization of their forest's potential.

Since 1979, FAO and UNDP have shared the costs of the systematic monitoring of projects with investment potential. In that year, three FAO forestry projects (in Brazil, Ghana and Morocco) were selected for investment monitoring. In the following year, five were selected. An increasing level of investment has continued ever since, thanks mainly to the role of the FAO Investment Centre in identifying and preparing suitable projects for consideration by the major financing organizations such as the World Bank and the Regional Development Banks.

Over the past decade, there have been 43 forestry investment projects, with a total investment of $2318 million and external investment of $810 million. This massive programme has been funded primarily by the World Bank and its soft-loan branch, the International Development Association, which together contributed nearly $600 million, in equal parts. Table 5 shows how the investment projects have been distributed by region and by project category.

Special mention should be made of the Investment Centre's relatively new role in finding finance for investment projects in the fields of fuelwood and community forestry. These include, for instance, a $10 million loan from the Asian Development Bank for a project to increase the supply of fuelwood, fruit and construction timber in Sri Lanka, an $11 million community forestry project in Bangladesh to replenish homestead wood-lots and strip planting along roads, canals and railways, and a $5 million loan for a similar project in Haiti. Three fuelwood projects have recently been financed in Africa: in Benin, Burkina Faso and Ethiopia. This last is a $24 million first-phase project to plant 15 000 ha to supply fuelwood and charcoal to the nation's capital, Addis Ababa.

This article is intended to provide a sketch of the work carried out by FAO's Forestry Department (formerly the Forestry Division) since 1950, when the Expanded Technical Assistance Programme, as the UN General Assembly instituted it at its First and Second Sessions, began to function within FAO and other agencies of the United Nations. It deals exclusively with the volume of forestry field projects and the evolution of FAO forestry aid policy over the past 35 years. Inevitably, the policy will continue to evolve, as new needs arise, and research finds new ways to satisfy them.

Table 5. Regional distribution of investment projects, by category, 1975-85

	Africa	Asia	Latin America	North Africa/Near East	Europe	Total
Fuelwood and community forestry	5	10	3	-	-	18
Environment	-	1	-	1	-	2
Industrial plantations	8	4	-	-	1	13
Forest industries	1	1	2	1	-	5
Logging and roads	3	-	1	1	-	5
Total	17	16	6	3	1	43