Asia-Pacific, Development & Aid, Environment, Headlines

NEPAL: Community Forests Rise Above Obstacles

Marty Logan

KATHMANDU, Jul 29 2006 (IPS) - It’s not easy being green, forestry activists in Nepal will tell you.

Community forestry in this South Asian nation grew from a seed sown during reforestation of the stripped hills around the capital Kathmandu in the 1960s into a grassroots development movement that today includes some 14,000 users’ groups and more than five million people, one-fifth of the population.

Movement leaders boast that the deforestation rate has fallen from 2.7 percent a year to 0.7 percent today and evidence of their success is easily visible in thickly forested slopes that three decades ago were barren and brown.

But it is not eternal spring for community forestry here. Since modern Nepal was proclaimed 237 years ago its rulers have tended to treat the country’s forests as largesse for favoured subjects, and King Gyanendra – who ruled directly from Feb 1 2005 until April’s “people’s movement” forced him to give up power – was no different, according to community forestry leaders.

While the royal regime is history, bureaucrats in the Ministry of Forests continue trying to reap the profits from timber and the other resources in Nepal’s 5.5 million ha of forests for the central government. That occurs despite the 1993 Forestry Act directing the state to restrict its activities primarily to clearing paths for villagers who want to take over patches of the nation’s forests.

Community forest users’ groups (CFUGS) themselves could unwittingly stunt continued growth of their movement: so protective are villagers of their plantations that they are reluctant to harvest any trees, even for selective thinning, so that they are forsaking revenue that could fund local development in a nation where at least one-third of the population lives on less than one US dollar a day.

“People remember how the hills were barren more than 30 years ago. This is what they want to see, this thick forest,” says District Forest Officer Arun S Poudyal gesturing out the open window of his pickup truck at the steep green slopes of the small valley beyond as we bump along the under repair road to Chautara, three hours northeast of Kathmandu. “If they see contractors coming to buy wood then they think that will be the end of the forest.”

The average community forest in this district, Sindhupalchowk, and neighbouring Kavre contains 600-700 trees per hectare but Poudyal says they should be thinned to about 300 per hectare, which would let the remaining trees grow larger and more valuable. The thinned trees could be sold now and the profits used by local communities, he adds.

In June, Nepal’s pioneering community forestry project, funded by the Australian government for 30 years, pulled out its deep roots from the two districts citing changed development priorities and lack of resources. It handed over a storied legacy, a training centre and equipment – including computers and a fax machine piled on the pick-up’s backseat – and huge promise.

Timber from the districts’ hundreds of community forests could generate more than Rs 1 billion (13.4 million US dollars) a year for the next 20 years, predicted Percy Stanley, South Asia director of AusAid, at a ceremony to mark the project. “Rs 1 billion a year in the hands of local groups can finance the building and management of a lot of rural infrastructure,” he added.

It already has. CFUGs across Nepal have used their profits to build and repair local schools, dig wells and build roads. With urging from donors like AusAid they are investing in “the poorest of the poor”: offering literacy classes, creating women’s micro-credit groups and buying fuel-efficient cooking stoves.

East of Chautara, CFUGs in Okhaldhunga, Dolakha and Ramechhap districts have invested in 328 school buildings, earmarked their earnings for teachers’ salaries and 42 groups have built bridges. They have also accumulated bank balances of more than Rs 7 million.

“We have seen that when you give authority, power and support to the people, they become vehicles for change,” says Bharat K Pokhrel, manager of the Nepal Swiss Community Forestry Project (NSCFP) which works with the three districts’ groups.

Earlier this year NSCFP surveyed the groups. Seventy percent reported that after initially failing to improve the lives of their poorest members, they started practising positive discrimination. The result: women now represent 35 percent of group members and Dalits (designated “lower caste” and “untouchable” by Hindu orthodoxy) are proportionally represented. “Government and INGOs have been unable to accomplish such outcomes,” says Pokhrel.

While CFUGs’ social achievements were celebrated by activists and donors, their financial success attracted the state and its main adversary in the past decade – Maoist rebels. Until they announced a ceasefire in April (extended for three months Friday) the Maoists had taken control of as much of three-fourths of Nepal’s countryside in the guise of delivering social justice, setting up people’s governments and taxing local landowners and NGOs.

One-fifth of NSCFP-backed groups reported that the Maoists forced them to: change their name to honour a Maoist “martyr”; install a rebel on their committee to oversee finances or; pay a percentage of their revenue as tax and register with the “people’s government”.

Then came the royal regime. A guideline developed during its 18-month tenure created forest coordination committees in all 75 districts. According to Bhola Bhattarai of the Federation of Community Forest Users, Nepal (FECOFUN) the guideline directed the committees to send 75 percent of district forest revenues to the central government and keep the remaining 25 percent.

FECOFUN actively opposed the move until the new democratic government agreed to repeal the measure, and others passed by the royal government, on Jun. 30. But on Jul. 14 it backtracked, reinstating the guideline.

“We were happy (with the agreement),” said Bhattarai in his office one recent morning while a delegation of two-dozen CFUG leaders sat on the floor of a large meeting room discussing strategy. “It showed the government was in favour of the people,” he added.

Then the Forests Ministry changed its decision. “They didn’t have any reason but some people from the Terai (Nepal’s southern plains) demanded it and influenced some officials who changed their minds,” argued Bhattarai.

The malaria-ridden Terai was slow to be populated. But once the gates opened in the middle of the last century, people flooded in: the 1991 census found that more than half of Nepal’s population now lives on the plains.

In a country where forest resources provide 75 percent of energy needs and 40 percent of animal fodder, that influx put tremendous pressure on Terai forests, as does the region’s location on India’s northern border – timber smuggling has long been a lucrative activity.

Activists say that because of its earning potential the government has been reluctant to recognise community forests in the Terai, preferring to designate “protected areas” and introducing a “collaborative forests” model in the region.

Regardless, locals have “captured” sections of Terai forest. In 2004, FECOFUN studied 178 such groups. On average they had taken over 215 ha each and had generated savings of Rs 75,000. At least 5,000 more CFUGs are waiting for the government to approve their plans, says Bhattarai.