Appraisal of the socio-economic contributions of NWFPs to sustainable development

The availability of comprehensive data on the production and trade of NWFPs within and among countries, complemented with other descriptive information on products and their users, is essential for an accurate appraisal of their true socio-economic contribution to sustainable development. This, in turn, will contribute to the elaboration (and acceptance by policy- and decision-makers) of appropriate policies leading to schemes for their sustainable utilization, more equitable access to the resources and fair distribution of the benefits obtained from them. Although FAO and many other agencies have already assembled a wealth of information on the socio-economic role of many NWFPs, the available statistics are very dispersed and insufficient; they are not aggregated at the national level and they are far from being comprehensive or global in scope.
The following activities of FAO's NWFP programme support the development of a comprehensive statistical database:
• improvement of methodologies for the classification and valuation of NWFPs, including further development and harmonization of definitions and concepts on and related to NWFPs, as an essential requirement for the development of relevant statistics at national level (see the preceding piece, "Towards a harmonized definition of non-wood forest products");
• compilation of an information system on NWFPs which includes descriptive and quantitative information on products, uses and users and production and trade statistics by country. Within the framework of a European Union (EU)-FAO partnership programme to support data collection and analysis for sustainable forest management in the African, Caribbean and Pacific regions, NWFP reviews for each country in those regions are currently in preparation. The country reviews contain data, gathered and validated through regional workshops, on production and trade statistics for major NWFPs as well as other descriptive information on the resource base and the NWFP sector in general.
Within the EU-FAO partnership activities, it is planned that similar exercises will soon be initiated for countries in Latin America and Asia. NWFP country briefs for countries in the Near East have been prepared by FAO's NWFP programme. These country briefs will soon be posted on the FAO Forest Department Web site as they become available.
Source:fao