Incentives for forest certifications in Vietnam: a case of the North Central region

Abstract

ABSTRACT The area of planted forests is continuously expanding to meet the demand for timber, while curbing the loss of natural forests. Additionally, the sustainability of timber production is also attracting attention, and the number of forest certifications acquired by local people is increasing. In the North Central Region of Vietnam, where forest certification has been most actively acquired by the local people, participation accelerators and bottlenecks for the forest certification group were extracted by identifying the incentives for 50 group members to acquire forest certification, the reasons for not acquiring forest certification for 47 non-members, and the process of acquiring land rights for planted forests by conducting semi-structured interviews. Consequently, many members joined the certification group for economic reasons, while more than 60% of the non-members did not join because of the longer harvesting rotation. By focusing on the land use rights acquisition process, it became clear that outsiders buy land use rights and plant trees. The land they acquired was larger than the land owned by the villagers, and all were forest certified. It can be said that out-of-village landowners contribute significantly to the expansion of forest certification. However, there are concerns that the overconcentration of land rights will widen economic disparities within regions and that forests, which serve as a safety net for local people, will disappear.