The importance of forest restoration is underlined by the ongoing UN decade and numerous countries, including Tanzania and Vietnam, have pledged to restoration initiatives. This project brings forward an innovative approach for forest restoration: upgrading the timber value chain. By empowering small-scale forest farmers, the timber value chain will be transformed into a high commodity chain which will ultimately enhance forest restoration.
Achieving better livelihood and conservation goals by strengthening small holder forestry
Forest landscape restoration aims to achieve the best compromise between ecosystem function and the socio-economic needs of rural communities. In many tropical countries, numerous small-scale forest farmers are important wood suppliers as well as actors in mosaic landscape restoration towards conservation goals. Due to the fragmentation of small-scale forest farmers and their limited awareness about their options, they have low power on the governance of the timber value chain. The timber value chain is the sequence of business activities to deliver timber products to customers. As such, the timber value chain connects the socio-economic needs to forest management and ecosystem function. Therefore, the analysis of the timber value chain is an important element towards more sustainable forest management in forest landscapes with many smallholders. Forest farmers’ organisations offer potential leverage to capacitate small-scale forest farmers and improve timber commercialization and sustainable tree production.
Forest farmers’ organisations (FFO) can play a key role to strengthen the role of small-scale forest farmers within the governance of timber value chains. In a participatory and interdisciplinary manner, the project will analyse the effect of FFO membership on livelihood, farm biodiversity and resilience. An analysis of the FFOs financial performance will allow to identify avenues for improvement and eliminate major limitations. The integrated approach (of value chain analysis) includes broader governance and actor-centred power aspects and allows to identify sociological and political factors for empowering the FFOs besides economic factors. Participative innovation platform workshops will bring together the actors of the timber value chain and serve as a place for knowledge transfer and co-developing strategies for increasing the power of forest farmers’ organisations.
The international project team involves Lukas Giessen and Kendisha Hintz from the Technical University Dresden and La Thi Tham, VNU University of Economics and Business in Vietnam and Felister Mombo, Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania, a collaboration that is well-established and profits from an existing network of forest farmers’ associations.
