Abstract
Forest tenure reform has no doubt attained significant gains in promoting social justice and equity in the forest sector, through legal recognition of the communities’ property rights over forest lands in many developing countries. This includes the right to harvest and market trees that the communities planted. Along these lines, the Philippines’ community-based forest management (CBFM) and smallholder forestry have the potential to meet the country’s wood demand and contribute to its poverty alleviation goal. Realities on the ground, however, make this lofty aspiration seems too far-fetched. Formal and informal barriers along the timber value chain restrict the growth and obstruct opportunities for community-based timber enterprises (CBTEs) and smallholder forestry. Using the case of CBFM and smallholder forestry in the Visayas and Mindanao Islands in the Philippines, respectively, this paper examines the hurdles posed by regulations and informal practices, such as restrictive policies and increased transaction costs, through a segment analysis of the timber value chain. It argues that failure to address these barriers would lead to the decline of CBTEs and smallholder enterprises, thus undermining the merits of the forest tenure reform.
Highlights
Forest tenure reform is anchored on the premise that the government’s legal recognition of the property rights of local communities over forest lands will eventually contribute to poverty alleviation and effective forest conservation
Rights to timber harvesting has shifted to community-based timber enterprises (CBTEs) and smallholders, the present timber value chain retains the old process followed when Timber License Agreements (TLAs) were still prevalent
The timber supply chain of smallholder forestry is not much different from the CBTE’s, except for tree registration taking the place of management planning
Summary
Forest tenure reform is anchored on the premise that the government’s legal recognition of the property rights of local communities over forest lands will eventually contribute to poverty alleviation and effective forest conservation. In the process of implementing reform, what some communities have received are “bundles of responsibilities” instead of “bundles of rights” [2] In this case, the use rights of communities and smallholders over the natural resources that they manage, timber, are overshadowed by numerous government requirements. Despite the initial gains achieved by forest tenure reform through community forestry, stringent government policies are hampering its continued success [4] These policies are meant to protect the existing forest cover and sustain the flow of goods and services obtained from the forest. Overregulation happens when the government imposes policies that are highly cumbersome and requires costly processes to obtain various permits that tend to discriminate against communities and smallholders, without the necessary support system It has produced a high transaction cost for communities and smallholders by way of informal barriers such as bestowing bribes that could otherwise be used for other potentially rewarding and beneficial activities. A list of acronyms is listed in Table 1 for ease of reference
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