Abstract
The study was carried out in three Community Forest User Groups (CFUGs) in Achham district of Nepal. This paper examines the benefits and costs incurred by three income class households (HHs) from Community Forest (CF) over a period of 10 years using semi-structured interviews with 212 randomly selected HHs and 3 sub-group discussions. The findings of the research reveal that the rich HHs derived the highest mean annual gross benefit (35.23%) followed by middle (32.47%) and poor (32.30%) income class HHs respectively. Likewise, rich HHs incurred the highest mean annual gross cost (49.82%) followed by middle (30.47%) and poor (19.71%) income class HHs respectively. Overall, benefits gained by the HHs was 17 times the cost incurred. While benefits from forest products constituted the highest share (97.26%) of benefits, conversely, forest product collection costs constituted the highest share (53.33%) of costs . The results of the research also suggest that rich HHs received the highest Net Present Value (US$ 2537.80) followed by poor (US$ 2504.11) and middle (US$ 2463.89) income class HHs over 10 years at 10% discount rate. The Benefit Cost Ratio for poor, middle and rich income class HHs was found to be 25.52, 16.32 and 11.14 respectively. Household level income from CF is significantly influenced by many bio-physical, economic and demographic variables. The analytical results suggested that education of HH head, distance to CF boundary from user’s home, age of HH head, and HH economic status were statistically significant and showed the negative linear relationship wth HH income from CF. On other hand, livestock unit and HH labor force were statistically significant as expected a priori and showed linear relationship with HH income from CF. Based on these findings, appropriate cost-benefit sharing mechanism were suggested with regular silvicultural operations to empower poor households in CF activities.
Highlights
Community forestry, recognized as the most successful participatory approach and a new development initiative of Nepal‟s forestry sector in rehabilitant forest condition and improving regeneration (Branney & Yadav, 2009, 2009; Gautam, Webb, Shivakoti, & Zoebisch, 2003; Mahapatra, 2000; Springate-Baginski, Soussan, Dev, Yadav, & Kiff, 1999), is defined as a process of delivering the authority of protecting and managing local forests to the local communities for fulfilling their subsistence needs of forest products in sustainable basis (Kanel, 2004)
The main objectives of this paper are (i) to value the direct benefits derived from Community Forest (CF) and inputs/costs associated to CF management contributed by users‟ households in monetary terms and (ii) to analyze the Benefit-Cost Ratio (BCR) of CF management over a ten years‟ time horizon cash flow incurred by Community Forest User Groups (CFUGs) households
As presented in (Figure 2), 84% of the respondents rely on agriculture as their major occupation followed by employees, teachers and others, all HHs rely on agriculture, agriculture alone could not sustain the annual food demand of households, people rely on other economic activities
Summary
Community forestry, recognized as the most successful participatory approach and a new development initiative of Nepal‟s forestry sector in rehabilitant forest condition and improving regeneration (Branney & Yadav, 2009, 2009; Gautam, Webb, Shivakoti, & Zoebisch, 2003; Mahapatra, 2000; Springate-Baginski, Soussan, Dev, Yadav, & Kiff, 1999), is defined as a process of delivering the authority of protecting and managing local forests to the local communities for fulfilling their subsistence needs of forest products in sustainable basis (Kanel, 2004) It is a means of social mobilization and livelihoods of rural people (Pokharel & Nurse, 2004).
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