Of the twelve species of Chamaedorea palm recorded for Belize, three are of international economic value because their cut leaves (xaté) are traded in the floricultural industry. Traditionally, ...Belize has not harvested xaté, the industry being based in Mexico and Guatemala. However, a decline in wild xaté stocks in these countries means Guatemalan leaf harvesters now illegally harvest xaté in Belize. To assess the local abundance of the Belizean Chamaedorea resource, its economic value, and the extent to which it has been illegally harvested, 209 plots measuring 20 meters (m) by 20 m were established in the Greater Maya Mountains (GMM) in western Belize, which includes the Chiquibul Forest Reserve (CFR). We estimate that 37.8 million leaves with a value of U.S. $0.3 million to xateros have been extracted from the CFR. The standing export value is calculated as U.S. $1.8 million for the CFR and U.S. $5 million for the GMM.
In 1945, forest resources covered up to 80 percent of the North Korean land surface. However, as the nation made use of its forests and underground resources, it did not provide sufficient backing ...for afforestation and forest administration, despite verbal support for such programs. Moreover, severe deforestation has resulted from a policy that encouraged terrace farming on mountains to increase farmland and that tolerated private farming on hills to alleviate famine. With the persistence of the North's economic crisis, people have devastated the forests to acquire food and firewood. The excessive use of the forests over the past 60 years has severely impeded the natural rehabilitation of degraded woodlands. Consequently, forest loss has been exacerbated. Localized torrential downpours due to global warming and climate change have caused great devastation in the forests. Fortunately, the North has recently begun efforts to rehabilitate its degraded woodlands. In recent years, it has been emphasizing a management style geared toward the protection of its national lands and the improvement of its forests, in order to secure their ecological, economic, and social function and value. In addition, the North has requested and received various forms of assistance from South Korea and international agencies. These changes indicate that North Korea hopes to rehabilitate its despoiled forests. Therefore, South Korea and the international community need to encourage and support North Korea's efforts in this area.
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In the last fifteen years, Tanzanian forest policy has embraced an agenda of biodiversity preservation coupled with privatisation that calls for the expansion of state oversight over forests and ...woodlands. Reflecting the hegemony of conservationist donors and international and local NGOs, and couched in a language of community conservation, this agenda decries peasant intrusion into forest reserves to burn charcoal for the urban market and to expand fields for agriculture. This agenda is a departure from over a century of state forestry that sought to exploit forests for domestic consumer and development needs, and to compete in export timber and charcoal markets. Following the Second World War, state forestry anchored peasants in selected forest reserves as licensed cultivators in the face of an ongoing labour shortage, in order to create tree plantations that replaced indigenous hardwoods with fast-growing exotic softwoods. This trend continued after independence as forestry was perceived as a means for agricultural modernisation and economic self-reliance, particularly after the Arusha Declaration. Current changes in forest policy prioritise forests more as ‘refugia’ for endemic plant and animal species, rather than as sources of timber and fuel, moving forest policy more in the direction of wildlife conservation, which has long aimed at excluding peasants and pastoralists from reserves. Recent evictions of peasants from forest reserves, and ongoing tensions between villagers, the state and conservationists, are the direct result of NGO pressure to protect forest reserves and to expand forest conservation into previously unreserved lands.
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With only 3.5 percent of its area under forests, Haryana state has become self-sufficient in small wood, fuelwood and industrial timber by instituting large-scale plantations outside forests, ...especially on farmlands. These plantations sustain about 670 wood-based veneer, plywood and board, manufacturing units, one large paper mill and about 4 300 sawmills. The units are mainly based on agro-forest produce, and Haryana has become the model state for agro-forestry practices. This overwhelming success results from efforts in the last three decades to promote the raising of plantations in non-forest lands by the state, national government and private and industrial concerns. The trees have not only given impetus to the growth of wood-based industries and employment opportunities but also increased the extent of area under forest and tree cover to 6.63 percent (FSI 2003).
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Governments appear increasingly constrained in their ability to make
independent policy choices in an era of global economic finance and
communication. As a result, scholars are more closely ...examining how
actors, institutions and economic forces that extend beyond state
borders can influence domestic public policies and politics. This
scholarship on “globalization” and “transnational
relations” serves as a corrective to a comparative public policy literature that has tended to
treat external pressures as either exogenous shocks, or as simply other
interests to which the state must respond.
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China has been implementing one of the world's largest ecological rehabilitation projects, the Natural Forest Protection Program (NFPP), to improve its fragile and precarious environmental ...conditions. This paper measures the socioeconomic impacts of the NFPP using input–output (I–O) models. We find that the NFPP will expand the annual output of the forest sectors by 5.8 billion Yuan and the whole economy by 8.9 billion Yuan by 2010. Employment will increase by 0.84 million in the forest sectors and by 0.93 million in the whole economy. Associated with the enormous expansion of forest protection and management are huge contributions to mitigating water runoff, soil erosion, flooding, and biodiversity loss. The investments and adjustments are thus worthwhile, if the program is properly implemented. The challenges are to transform loggers into tree planters and forest managers and to ensure that the financial and institutional commitments by the local and national governments will be materialized.
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Interethnic and cross-cultural preferences for and perceptions of landscape change have been recurrent subjects of interest in environmental psychology, environmental sociology, and landscape ...architecture research. Cross-cultural studies of Asian, European, and Euro-American perceptions of landscape condition are fairly common, but few if any studies have compared aboriginal and nonaboriginal perceptions of a range of controlled landscape conditions. A sample of aboriginal and nonaboriginal residents of British Columbia’s upper Skeena Valley indicates considerable interethnic consistency in preference evaluations of a series of photo-realistic landscape change scenarios. Reflection on the cultural and motivational determinants of landscape preference indicates a need for more explicit operational definitions of the terms culture and community o f interest in landscape research.
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This article analyzes a project concerned with the conversion of agricultural land into forests and the impact on local communities in the upper Min River Basin in China. The aim of the project, ...called “Grain for Green” (Tui Geng Huan Lin), is to improve watershed conditions, enhance biodiversity, and conserve natural resources. Results from a participatory socioeconomic survey showed that the basic living standards of farmers were guaranteed by government subsidies because some of their cultivated land was converted into protected forest. The common perception is that although farmers were happy to participate in the project because they became less dependent on agriculture and were able to diversify their income, they were worried about their future after 8 years of government subsidies and preferred to plant forests for economic rather than ecological reasons. There is also a fear that if subsidies end, farmers may turn forestland into sloping cultivation land. To guarantee sustainable implementation of the Grain for Green Project, farmers discussed options with local government officials. In face-to-face interviews, they discussed issues such as basic cropland protection, educational investment, out-migration of the workforce, hydroelectricity exploitation, and tourism development.
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