کاهش فقر و جنگل های گرمسیری - محدوده هم افزایی چیست؟

This paper explores the “state-of-the-art” of the two-way causal links between poverty alleviation and natural tropical forests. Microimpacts of rising poverty can increase or slow forest loss. At the macrolevel, poverty also has an ambiguous effect, but it is probable that higher income stimulates forest loss by raising demand for agricultural land. The second question is what potential forest-led development has to alleviate a country's poverty, in terms of producer benefits, consumer benefits and economy-wide employment. Natural forests widely serve as “safety nets” for the rural poor, but it proves difficult to raise producer benefits significantly. Urban consumer benefits from forest, an important target for pro-poor agricultural innovation, are limited and seldom favor the poor. Absorption of (poor) unskilled labor is low in forestry, which tends to be capital-intensive. Natural forests may thus lack comparative advantage for poverty alleviation. There are few “win–win” synergies between natural forests and national poverty reduction, which may help to explain why the loss of tropical forests is ongoing. This may have important implications for our understanding of “sustainable forest development” and for the design of both conservation and poverty-alleviation strategies.

How much can forest research and development (R&D)—the generation of new knowledge on both forest commodity production and on the broader principles of natural resource management (NRM)—contribute to the simultaneous goals of poverty alleviation and biodiversity conservation? This paper gives an overview of the literature on this topic, and draws on ongoing research at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), particularly in Latin America. It also puts forward some hypotheses on expected synergies and contradictions between environmental and developmental forest objectives. I argue that, for the case of tropical forests, the very optimistic outlook on “win–win” potentials in the Brundtland report and from RIO 1992 was based on the inadequate implicit diagnosis that poverty is the cause of forest destruction. This, in turn, has raised overly optimistic expectations on the scope for integrating forest conservation and development objectives. Forests may sustain poor people and help them survive, but degrading and converting forests may also be an important but not always “unsustainable,” pathway out of their poverty. In several respects, natural forests may have a poor comparative advantage for alleviating human poverty. The contradictions tend to outweigh the synergies. The structure of the paper is the following. Section 2 provides basic definitions in regard to both forests and poverty. Section 3 reviews some of the thinking on the poverty–forest interaction over the last decades. 4 and 5 examine the impact of poverty on forests, at the macro- and microlevel, respectively. In 6 and 7, we are interested in the reverse causality—identifying recent poverty trends in tropical developing countries (Section 6) and the potential of tropical forests for poverty alleviation (Section 7). Section 8 reviews the main arguments of this paper, while Section 9 looks at main policy lessons for both conservation and poverty-alleviation strategies.

This paper attempts to provide inputs for the analysis of the two-way causal links between poverty alleviation and natural tropical forests—i.e., the options relating to their conservation, management, degradation or conversion. Experiences differ according to factors such as geographical regions, forest types, the degree of forest abundance and the wealth of forest resources. The general picture indicates, however, that there may be fewer “win–win” synergies between natural forest conservation and poverty alleviation than those of us who are sympathetic to forest conservation would prefer. Poverty can be defined in both welfare and asset terms, but the latter is likely to have more explanatory power vis-à-vis the fate of forests. Deforestation, i.e., a radical removal of tree cover, is mostly an investment in future land uses, and as such is quite different from forest degradation (logging, overharvesting, etc.). At the microlevel of forested areas, reduced poverty can cause either more or less deforestation. At the macrolevel, less poverty also has an ambiguous effect on forests, but in the initial stages of the forest transition, higher income is likely to fuel crop-land demand and forest conversion. For the reverse causality, the potential for forest-led development to alleviate a country's poverty tends to be limited. Current benefits from natural forests to poor rural producers may be safeguarded, as a “defensive” strategy, but it is difficult to raise benefits in a sustained manner, except perhaps redistributing timber-profits and promoting selected commercial NWFPs. Urban consumer benefits, an area of growing poverty relevance, are likely to be even more restricted from forests, and will seldom favor the poor. Likewise, the economy-wide absorption of (poor) unskilled labor is not helped much by forestry, which is a relatively capital-intensive sector. A general conclusion is that, in most settings, natural forests tend to have little comparative advantage for the large-scale alleviation of poverty, especially compared to their great land-use competitor, agriculture. Like other “wildlands,” their advantage is that nature provides for multiple commodities that can be harvested without capital inputs and human production efforts. Their disadvantage is that extraction is usually labor-intensive, land-extensive and supply is inflexible vis-à-vis demand changes. This becomes important in areas where “development” is advancing, in the sense that more production factors and infrastructure per land unit are becoming available. It can be synthesized in an overall, rather pessimistic hypothesis: In a landscape designed exclusively for the objective of poverty alleviation, where a flexible supply of labor, capital and access to physical infrastructure (roads, rail, ports) and alternative land use options exist, there will be little place for natural forests. Two underlying assumptions accompany this hypothesis on the transition towards a `full world' scenario. One is that alternative land uses actually exist, such as agriculture, cattle ranching, but also agroforestry or plantation forests, i.e., that the opportunity costs of conservation are greater than zero. This probably applies to most tropical areas. The second premise is that environmental services at the global (carbon, biodiversity conservation, etc.) and national/ regional level (ecotourism, hydrological benefits, etc.) are uncompensated, so that they generate no income to local land-use decision-makers, and thus have no bearing on poverty. Unfortunately, this assumption also reflects current reality quite well. The current “free-rider” character of forest eco-services is detrimental both to the forest-dwelling poor (who lose a potential income), to global interests (who irreversibly lose environmental assets), but also to the tropical poor outside of the forest. For instance, global warming, which deforestation contributes to, is expected to hit poor people in tropical countries particularly hard, because of water shortages, declining crop yields and greater disease-proneness (IPCC, 2001). Yet, counterexamples of poverty-alleviating forest services can be built upon in the search for “win–win” niches. For instance, ecotourism has proved in a number of cases to provide both successful “trickle-down” to local forest dwellers and direct incentives to protect, if not large frontier forests, than at least valuable forest fragments.21 Of course, at present landscapes are not all “designed exclusively for the objective of poverty alleviation,” nor for satisfying human needs in a broader sense. There are places that are quite close to that premise, such as the island of Java or Bangladesh, whereas others are far from that, such as the Guyanas or Gabon. The general point is that future population and consumption growth implies that more and more areas are approaching that stage, so that pressures on forests will continue. Natural tropical forests have not evolved in a way that makes them suitable to serve human needs exclusively. In a static sense, forests may be very important safety nets for poor people's food security and subsistence needs (“defensive” objectives). In a transition phase, they may also be important sources of rent extracted and reinvested in sectors with greater production potentials, allowing for a diversification of income sources. But in cases where people are prevented from diversification, e.g., by debt peonage, contracts or lack of alternatives, forest products may actually turn from “safety nets” into “poverty traps” (Browder, 1992; Neumann & Hirsch, 2000, pp. 32–43). To the extent that “development” empowers humans to dominate landscapes for their own purposes, they will inevitably seek to modify natural ecosystems and domesticate its resources, in order to produce more specialized outputs that meet human demands. These modifications, beyond a certain threshold, are bound to cause declines in the biological diversity of natural ecosystems, until the point at which they cease to be natural and instead become home gardens, tree plantations, crop fields or pastures. Conversely, the conservation of biologically rich but commercially-poor natural forests, and of associated modes of their human exploitation, is seldom conducive to the “assertive” objective of poverty alleviation. At present, what protects the remaining natural tropical forests from a sad fate is not that they provide an overwhelming flow of products for poverty alleviation, triggering active and robust human conservation efforts. On the contrary, their present state is rather due to features of “underdevelopment” that have hitherto excluded these areas from (full) integration into national economies, and left them passively behind as areas not (yet) profitable to exploit and convert. These features include low population density (inelastic labor supply), lacking access to credit and to physical infrastructure, rugged topography, limited soil potentials, tropical diseases or tribal warfare—it is these, from a human viewpoint, grim features that tend to be the silent but gradually weakening protectors of tropical forests. Unfortunately, these factors are actually more correlated to sustained human poverty than to its alleviation.