Livelihoods and Markets

Community forestry can help secure and strengthen the livelihoods of millions of the region's poorest people.

Throughout the Asia-Pacific region, 72% of the people in extreme poverty live in rural areas, and hundreds of millions of people depend on forests for support. Forests offer valuable resources that can help local people, but their benefits too often are captured by outside investors, large-scale industrial foresters, governments, or local elites.

Community forestry can ensure that more of these benefits go to the local people who need them the most. Legal community forestry rights give these people secure access to basic resources such as food, water, timber, medicinal plants, firewood, and grazing land for animals.

Community forestry systems provide subsistence-level benefits, which protect many rural people from chronic hunger and extreme poverty. However, throughout the region, many restrictions on land use, combined with a lack of information and technical skills, limit the commercial benefits that local people can gain from the opportunities that community management offers.

Our Work

RECOFTC works to increase the commercial benefits that community forestry can provide, using it as a tool to reduce rates of rural poverty. To help community forestry systems reach this potential, we need to better link communities to funding opportunities and markets, and to help build their technical and business skills. Moreover, we need to ensure that livelihood opportunities include marginalized groups and benefit the poorest forest dwellers.

Therefore, RECOFTC's emerging Livelihoods and Markets program focuses on:

• Building technical and business skills
• Reducing restrictions
• Finding investment opportunities
• Increasing market access
• Exploring opportunities for community business partnerships
• Rewarding socially and environmentally responsible forest management

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Our Work on Livelihoods