The plan is an outcome of a conference,
aptly named ‘Strength in numbers’, which took place in Guilin, China. It
gathered 150 participants from many forest-related sectors, countries and
regions to discuss the role of producer organisations in sustainably managing
forests and generating income at local, national and regional levels.
It was the first such meeting to focus on
the important role of forest producer organisations. Governments and investors
rarely recognise this role despite the fact that there are around one billion
smallholders, indigenous people and local community members owning one quarter
of the world’s forests and generating US$75–100 billion per year in goods and
services.
"As
a group, local forest producers play a major role in global trade, and yet are
often overlooked when we talk about the role of the private sector in forest
landscape management and restoration," says Chris Buss, Deputy Director of
IUCN’s Forest and Climate Change Programme. Many of the obstacles that
producers face can be overcome by forming organisations and supporting each
other at a practical and political level.
Despite
the differences between participants, there were many clear areas of consensus
or, as FAO’s Jeffrey Campbell, Manager of the Forest and Farm Facility,
concluded “there are many roads but one map” and although “forest and farm
producer organisations each have unique characteristics according to country,
context, stage of development, product or enterprise, size, gender of members,
cultural character and so on, they face a number of common challenges as well
as solutions [to these challenges].”
A statement containing recommendations for
donors, governments and producer organisations themselves, was developed and
agreed by participants. This will serve as the ‘road map’ for strengthening
producer organisations in future, with participants taking the recommendations
back with them to their own countries.
A
key recommendation was that all forest producers, regardless of the size and
location of their forests, should have access to the services they need to
develop successful forest-based enterprises. Forest producer organisations
themselves can help deliver such services through partnerships with NGOs,
consultants, private companies, government agencies and development agencies.
Conference
participants also called on development partners to take a long-term approach
to engaging with producer organisations and governments at the national,
regional and global levels, including through the Forest and Farm Facility.
Finally, the statement underlines the need
for governments to implement
The conference was also an opportunity for
China to showcase its extraordinary tenure reform that has left 115,000 forest
producer cooperatives (representing 90 million forest farmers) with more income
and more forest. Roughly 70 per cent of China’s annual reforestation of 2.9
million hectares is now attributed to such groups, although recent reports from
China suggest that the future of subsidies supporting this reforestation
process now hang in the balance.
“What was amazing about the conference”
says Duncan Macqueen, a Principal Researcher on forests at the International
Institute of Environment and Development “was the clear consensus that forest
and farm producer organisations are the key to forest restoration and can
visibly do so at scale, as China is demonstrating.”
The ‘Forest and Farm Facility’ (FFF), which
seeks to promote sustainable forest and farm management by supporting producer
organizations at all levels to engage in policies and investments that meet the
needs of local people, was one of the co-organisers of the event. 
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