Saving forests: an inspiring success story from India

In India economic liberalisation and penetration by global market forces are combining with surging population growth and demand for firewood to threaten the country’s once extensive natural forests. What can be done? Will the national government’s apparent embrace of gender-sensitive natural resources management save India’s forests or does their survival depend on local people?

A book from Oxfam GB chronicles the development, and unlikely successes, of a Gandhian-inspired community-based forest protection movement in Orissa. Its central finding – that forest-dependent communities can achieve forest regeneration, protection and management without the assistance and intervention of the state – is of global relevance.

Protecting forests should be a national priority as India has one of the world’s richest biotic environments. Its 46,000 plant and 81,000 animal species represent 8 percent of the planet’s known biological diversity. Millions of people depend to some extent on forests. India’s tribal peoples (7 percent of the total population) are heavily dependent on forest products. Two thirds of the estimated 48 million Indians who are primarily dependent on forests for their livelihoods are tribals. Each year a million people are displaced from their forest homes.

Orissa, one of India’s poorest states, has been at the forefront of environmental protests. Development projects have disrupted the livelihoods of members of SScheduled Castes ('Untouchables') and the Adivasi or indigenous people (respectively 16 and 22 percent of the state’s population). In the 1970s and 1980s Orissa lost forest area equivalent to half the area of Wales.

Friends of Trees and Living Beings (BOJBP) was born in a demoralised community almost on its deathbed as forests and wildlife had disappeared and erosion and drought were destroying agriculture. In 1982 three charismatic individuals began a campaign against ‘wood-eating’ tigers which has now spread to a thousand villages and spawned an umbrella coalition of activist communities. Fighting caste discrimination as vigorously as deforestation, BOJBP supporters call themselves members of the ‘forest caste’. Instead of dowries, brides and grooms exchange saplings with their wedding vows; children and teachers are at the forefront of a movement which eschews traditional politics.

The study produces evidence that:

• Mono cropping of non-indigenous trees is environmentally unsustainable.
• Most of India’s firewood production is from illegal timber cultivation, often with the connivance of bribed officials.
• The Joint Forestry Management policy enacted in 1990 has yet to embrace truly participatory approaches to saving forests. States have not enacted national guidelines to involve women.
• Shifting cultivators are used as scapegoats when in reality their practices are inherently sustainable.

The study argues that donors and Indian policymakers should:

• facilitate greater dialogue between academic ‘experts’ in scientific forestry and those at the coalface of participatory forest management
• provide greater technical support to regeneration of indigenous forests
• recognise the potency of teacher-children alliances to build a green culture
• support networks and umbrella organisations to prevent individual villages being obliged to negotiate on unequal terms with the Forestry Department and/or loggers.

Source(s):
‘Community forest management: a casebook from India’, Oxfam Publishing, by Joe Human and Manoj Pattanaik, 2000 Full document.

Funded by: Oxfam GB

id21 Research Highlight: 21 November 2001

Further Information:
Helen Bowers
Oxfam Publishing
274 Banbury Road
Oxford OX2 7DZ
UK

Tel: +44 (0)1865 311311
Fax: +44 (0)1865 313925
Contact the contributor: publish@oxfam.org.uk

Oxfam GB

Other related links:
'Do new approaches to forest governance help the poor? Tracking science-policy processes'

'Forest futures: improving institutions for better rural livelihoods'

'Rhetoric or reality? Joint management of natural resources in India'

The World Bank focuses on Forests and Forestry

See also WRI Forests

IUCN aims towards forest conservation

CIFOR researches sustainable forest management