Guwahati, May 6: International organisations active in the field of community forests, under the aegis of Community Forestry International (CFI), are working on a project to support the development of effective policies and programmes enabling communities to manage forest lands in the Northeast.
The partner institutions in the project are the regional centre of the National Afforestation and Eco Development Board and the North Eastern Hill University. The project, being funded by the John and Catherine MacArthur Foundation, will end in 2005. The CFI assists rural communities to stabilise and regenerate forests.
The project was formulated to devise a special policy framework for reflecting the special rights of community groups over forest resources. Community empowerment through enabling resource management programmes and policies is urgently required, given the growing external pressures on timber resources from private sector operators, migrants and corrupt officials within state governments.
While laws and policies for many states and districts in the Northeast provide communities with significant forest rights, in recent decades there has been a tendency to extend national forest policies of the country to the region, undermining the ancestral domain claims of indigenous tribals.
In the first phase, the project will establish a community forest management working group for the Northeast with representatives from the seven states plus members from community forest management groups and non-governmental organisations. The community forest management working group will be responsible for reviewing case study reports and policy assessment studies to make recommendations to the Centre as well as state governments and devise appropriate policy actions.
According to project officials, special community forest management policies will need to be designed in the Northeast that reflect the historic rights and current pressures faced by villages. From a conservation standpoint, policies need to be developed which support communities and create incentives for them to better withstand pressures for forest privatisation and commercial exploitation. At present, market pressures from large urban centres in Bangladesh and eastern India constitute a major factor in deforestation.
“There has been little momentum to raise community resource management concerns to a policy level. Without state and national policy support, as well as greater international understanding and financing, fragile community forest management institutions are likely to collapse under outside pressures, leading to an accelerated depletion of the region’s rich forests and biodiversity,” the project proposal states.
It further says there is a need for a mechanism and process that can bring government officials, forest officers, scientists, and NGOs together to explore formulating an enabling policy environment that will support local communities to act effectively as custodians of the region’s forests.
Community Forestry International and its partners have been actively involved in guiding the development of community forest management policies and programmes in India for over a decade.