This activity consists of:

• conducting ‘development and conservation activities … by individuals, associations and organizations in order to make forest products available for fuel wood, construction, industry, environmental protection and other purposes’. This is supposed to be done ‘on the basis of the customary management and land use plan’;
• protecting ‘the ownership rights of individuals, groups, associations and organizations over the forest they developed and under their holdings per the permission of the customary communal land management’.

COMMENTARY

Expand private forest development. This implementation activity can be interpreted in three ways: First, as promoting the establishment of new private forests in pastoral areas. Second, as promoting the privatization of existing forests. In both cases, key resources could be lost from pastoral systems – rangeland in the first case and forests in the second. A third possible interpretation of this activity would be one that it is aimed at supporting private initiatives to establish and develop forests in pastoral areas, but without altering the status of the land as rangeland under the flexible/communal land-holding system that is key to the productivity and sustainability of pastoral systems. Only this third interpretation is consistent with the policy objective of moving away from the mistakes of the past and finally promoting a kind of pastoral development that builds on pastoral systems rather than hindering them.

c. Expand forest market development (p.82) »