Experts Meeting: Unlocking the Wealth of Forests for Community Development

Community forestry has the potential to deliver significant economic benefits for local communities. However, this requires that it moves beyond providing mainly subsistence goods to becoming a vehicle for the development of forest enterprises that can contribute to a genuine new forest economy. There are significant challenges now faced by countries, in moving community forestry to full commercialization. There is urgent need to remove regulatory bottlenecks and strengthen community institutions to negotiate and tap into profitable markets.

FAO and its partners, ITTO and RECOFTC, are interested in pursuing an international initiative to promote the potential of community forests in contributing significantly to sustainable development of community forestry and thus to wider national development. The Expert group meeting is therefore an opportunity to further concretize and develop a course of action. The goal of the meeting is to develop concrete strategies for an international agenda to promote commercialization of products from community forests in order to contribute to community and national economic development efforts.

RECOFTC will be presenting preliminary results of our research on regulatory barriers, as well as sponsoring three participants to attend the meeting.

Watch a short video from FAO about the event:

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