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Yayasan Dian Tama (YDT) is a foundation in West Kalimantan, Indonesia, that promotes community development and biodiversity conservation of forest dwellers in a community-based forest concession (Participatory Forest Management Area). One of its activities is to train villagers in the harvesting and processing of non-timber forest products, namely bamboo mats, rattan baskets, and two grades of resin from the damar tree. YDT then coordinates the sale of the products to a range of buyers, from local to national, with an international end market for some goods. The greater the income to be made from these alternate activities, the less likely local people are to cut timber. Yet, assessments were still needed to determine if the villagers were maximizing the profits generated by these alternative livelihoods.
To fill this gap in knowledge, YDT conducted a profitability analysis, supported by the Biodiversity Conservation Network. The analysis considered production, distribution, and overhead costs, including costs for labor, fees charged by the government for resource extraction, processing equipment, transportation, promotion, office expenses, and storage. Setting costs against revenues, YDT saw that rattan baskets and Grade A damar resin were much more profitable than bamboo mats and Grade B resin.
With this new information, the program managers were left with two choices. First, they could increase production in those products that were most profitable and decrease production in the others. Of course, the effects on the ecosystem of a shift in extraction practices had to be assessed first to ensure its ecological wisdom. The second option offered a strictly economic solution-to examine the breakdown of costs for the less profitable products and cut them where possible. After this step in the analysis, it was clear that what made bamboo mats and Grade B resin less profitable were high overhead costs-advertising, travel, taxes and fees, communication with buyers, etc. By lowering these costs, YDT could increase the amount of profits that made it into the hands of villagers, without increasing extractive activities.
Adapted from Mary Ames, "Assessing the Profitability of Forest-based Enterprises" in Incomes from the Forest: Methods for the Development and Conservation of Forest Products for Local Communities (Wollenberg and Ingles 1997).
How are socio-economic issues related to biodiversity conservation?
Economic development is the creation, maintenance and distribution of wealth and income within a community and a society. What we seek from an economy are long-term, widely-shared increases in our standard of living, both tangible and intangible. Many conservation practitioners like to think of the relationship between economic development and the environment as two legs of a three-legged stool, with socio-political considerations being the third leg. In order for this stool to stand upright, equal weight must be put on all three legs. The tools in this section can help you design and conduct assessments that will provide appropriate information and strength to the economic and socio-political components of your project so that they share the weight with the ecological aspects.
Many practitioners in the planning stage of a project find that they lack essential information about the source of threats to biodiversity or the feasibility of certain interventions. For example, they may wonder: - Why do people continue to cut timber in spite of laws against it and fees for offenders?
- Will people adopt sustainable agriculture techniques?
- Culturally, what is the value of a lake to the people who live around it?
- What is the labor pool of an area, and how will that affect our project?
- What will be the environmental impact of a proposed development project?
- Is an ecotourism project feasible in our program?
- What are the market forces that encourage overharvesting?
- What are the options for environmental enterprise in a region?
- Which of the current policies support a sustainable economy?
Economic and socio-political assessments help to answer questions like these, serving as a foundation for well-formed community and conservation goals and carefully selected sustainable development priorities in and around protected areas. Applicable to all scales of conservation, assessments are necessary for examining everything from a proposed industrial mining operation to an ecotourism lodge to a community-level agroforestry project to shifts in household production to new cash crops, such as coffee. A thorough assessment directs you to potential points of intervention for biodiversity conservation by identifying sources of threats to ecosystems and species, and opportunities for abating threats and promoting positive action.
Tools in this section include those that examine the economic activities in an area, potential support for and interest in these activities, and available resources and infrastructure, as well as social and political factors, such as cultural traditions (i.e., non-material values of the environment), social structures (e.g., gender, demographics, etc.), enterprise experience, and the interactions between policy on resource use and the economy. This section also presents methods for alternative livelihoods, that is, income-generating activities that are ecologically sound alternatives to unsustainable resource extraction. They can help you set up and manage a community enterprise, find a market for products or ecotourism activities, pilot techniques in sustainable agriculture or the harvest of non-timber forest products, or design policy to promote sustainable economies.
Who can do economic assessments and implement alternative livelihood projects?
You don't have to be an economist to use the tools in this section. Most of them are designed for conservation practitioners at regional and local levels. However, assembling a multi-disciplinary team of economists, anthropologists, demographers, political scientists, and/or sociologists will certainly benefit your conservation work.
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©2003 Community Conservation Coalition
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Boletin Mensual: June 2008
