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Commonwealth
Forests | | |
 Issues
The critical issues with NWFP are: finding the statistics to capture their importance, finding
methods to estimate a sustainable harvest level, developing new markets for these products in
developed countries, determining an appropriate property rights systems for resource
allocation, determining a fair method of taxation and getting the appropriate technical support
to those whose economic activity is dependant on the NWFP.
A great deal of the buying and selling of these products occurs in informal markets. Therefore
it is difficult to describe to policy actors their significance to government revenues, their
contribution to local livelihoods and their contribution to the increasing interest in ‘local’ foods.
A few non-Commonwealth countries have developed statistical systems to capture their social
and economic importance but these are not widespread in the Commonwealth.
Although statistics are usually either unavailable or unreliable there is strong world-wide
interest in NWFP and a great many networks and sources of information have developed. A
partial list of networks is available in the 1999 issue of Unasylva devoted to Non-wood forest
products and income generation (volume 50, number 198, p. 56) while the Non-Wood News of
FAO (www.fao.org/forestry/nwfp/nonwood.htm
) provides a six-monthly digest of current
developments in this field.
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