Smallholder Tree Growing in South and Southeast Asia - Smallholder Tree Growing for Rural Development and Environmental Services - page 25

fuelwood requirements. Of the 14.6 million cubic meters of timber produced per year,
an estimated 83 percent was derived from homesteads (house compounds and
farmlands), 10 percent from estates and only about 7 percent from forest areas (FAO
2001). There are a diversity of agroforestry systems directed at smallholder tree grow-
ing including trees in farms and on farm boundaries, trees grown in close association
with village rainwater collection ponds, crop-fallow rotations, silvopastoral systems,
trees within settlements, agroforests, community forests and a variety of local forest
management and ethnoforestry practices (Pandey 2007). The promotion of tree growing
through agro- and community forestry systems emerged because of concerns over on-
going forest degradation in the 1970s. In 1976, the National Commission on Agriculture
(NCA) recommended the creation of 'social forests' on common lands and state forests
to provide the local communities fuelwood, small timber and fodder, yet without spe-
cifically emphasizing the role of local people (Sekhar and Jørgensen 2003). With
projects spread all over the country, the planting of trees for commercial or subsistence
purposes was promoted in and around privately owned farms (farm forestry), in combi-
nation with agricultural crops on cultivated fields (agroforestry), in the form of woodlots
on village common lands or community lands (community forestry), as block planta-
tions on government wastelands and degraded forestlands, and along road sides, canals
and railroads (extension forestry). The tree plantations covered areas of 0.1 ha or more
in the case of block plantations, less than 0.1 ha in the case of farm forestry, or consisted
of lines of individual trees along, for example, road sides (Harrison et al. 2002).
However, disappointing results of the social forestry projects and the ongoing deforesta-
tion made the Indian government change its forestry policy towards a more people-
oriented approach of Joint Forest Management (JFM), i.e., a state-community
partnerships in forest management. The Indian National Forest Policy of 1988 (MoEF
1988) together with a government resolution on participatory forest management
(MoEF 1990) entrust local communities with legal access to forest resources, encour-
age communities to set up village forest management committees and ensure a share of
the produce from the forest resources (Yadama et al. 1997).
Thailand
Examples of traditional tree growing activities in Thailand are the forest gardens
on the Kao Luang slopes in southern Thailand and the miang gardens (Werner
1996) or jungle tea agroforests (Thomas et al. 2007) in northern Thailand.
The latter refer to tea trees that grow naturally in hill evergreen forests, with
Camellia sinensis L . being planted and managed as an understory tree and used
by villagers to produce green tea or miang. Moreover, various ethnic minority
groups have been living as farmers in upland forest for a long period of time, as
described by Kunstadter et al. (1978), making use of different types of swidden
systems including opium-based systems (Thomas et al. 2007). Traditionally, the
management and use of Thai forests has been controlled by relatively autono-
mous local nobilities, many of whom gained profits from logging contracts with