Constraints and Opportunities for Commercial Timber Extraction From Community and Smallholder Forests

... The National Community Forestry Instruction (1995) provides communities the opportunity for 30 year licenses to manage state forests lands for natural forest protection, mixed agro-forestry and timber production systems. The Forestry Master Plan (2001) envisions around 920,000 ha to be handed to local Forest User Groups (FUGs) by 2030, about 1.36% of the total land area.

A recent review of community forestry (CF) conducted in 2011 identified a range of constraints to allowing individual CFs to “fulfil their potential”, and to scaling up the handover of CF to better meet the 2001 Forestry Master Plan targets. The review focused mostly on the institutional and technical impediments but also clearly identified the need for the scope of CF to shift from “subsistence to enterprise” and integrate “timber harvesting on a significantly larger scale”.

Since 2008, FFI Myanmar and its partners have been actively supporting the establishment of CF as a tool for watershed protection, protected area buffer zone establishment and livelihood development. To date FFI has assisted over 50 communities with CF establishment, provided small grants and technical assistance to a further 30 CF groups, and conducted CF training for state and regional level civil society groups.

FFI’s current strategic plan includes: i) The continued development of CF models to become self-funding, and ii) Evidence-based advocacy to streamline the CF application procedure. The long-term sustainability of CF in Myanmar may not be clear for some years, as even the oldest commercial CF trees are only 15 years old, but CF seems to offer considerable potential to provide a supply of timber and therefore generate substantial revenues for local communities.

The current reforms in the Myanmar forest sector and the EU FLEGT initiative are providing an unprecedented opportunity to clarify community rights over CF timber and by doing so to promote the expansion and sustainability of CF.

This report was prepared under an FFI project supported by the FAO/EU FLEGT Support Programme, which promotes the implementation of the FLEGT Action Plan by improving forest governance, providing technical assistance, and building capacity through funding projects in eligible countries...