Farmer Tree Planting Barriers to Sustainable Forest Management - Smallholder Tree Growing for Rural Development and Environmental Services - page 425

Institutional and policy changes and a better understanding of local communi-
ties, their needs and perceptions, are clearly imperative if smallholder tree growing
is to be successful in its contribution to sustainable management of forest and natu-
ral resources in general (see De Lopez 2002 for Cambodia; Springate-Baginski
et al. 2003 for Nepal; Sato 2003 for Thailand; Douglas 2006 for Lao PDR, Vietnam,
Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia; Thapa and Rasul, 2006 for Bangladesh; see
also Hares, Chapter 19, this volume).
Finally, in combination with bottleneck 1, the lack of institutional mechanisms
for rewarding 'sustainability' and 'forest functions' indicates that criterion 7 of the
Montreal process is the largest challenge facing agroforestry. This constraint, how-
ever, might be overcome at relatively low cost through policy changes, once a
broader awareness is raised of the opportunities that are currently missed.

20.8 Concluding Remarks: Widening All Bottlenecks

in the Conduit to Sustainability

As indicated in Fig. 20.2, the need for forest and agricultural products as well as
forest functions can be met by various combinations of natural forest, extensively
and intensively managed forest plantations, intensively managed agriculture, and
multifunctional mosaics and patchworks generally associated with agroforestry.
There is no a priori reason to exclude any of these options from the public debate.
The smallholder agroforestry option may have been neglected so far, and remains
absent from most statistics and global conventions, but in placing agroforestry on
the 'mental map' we argue that balanced attention is needed, not special favors.
In various parts of the world, current relationships between agroforestry and planta-
tion forestry are perceived to be complementary, neutral or competitive. It may be
difficult to judge at this stage how far we are removed from a 'level playing field',
as the allocation of land to either large-scale plantations or smallholder agroforestry
is essentially a political decision, with substantial economic implications. We suggest
that an open-minded evaluation of the ability of (inter)national policy frameworks
to provide productive and protective forest functions to society at large, through
both plantation forestry and agroforestry, in the context of 'sustainable forest
management'.
In the paper we discussed six constraints that currently limit smallholder tree
production. Four of these six are directly in the domain of national policies, and
they indicate that substantial progress towards 'sustainable forest management' can
be made by widening these policy-based bottlenecks, probably at low cost. Looking
back at the seven criteria of the Montreal Process on Criteria and Indicators for
Sustainable Forest Management (SFM), we may conclude that criterion 7 (bottle-
neck 6 discussed in this chapter) on the 'legal and institutional framework' may be
the largest obstacle to recognition of agroforestry as a form of sustainable forest
management. Priority should be given to the removal of artificial boundaries cre-
ated in legislative and institutional contexts, that are at odds with the continuum of