Contribution of Forestry to Poverty Alleviation - APFNet

allocated for communities to manage and utilize. Rural people, who practice swidden cultivation, often
collect fuelwood from their newly-cleared upland rice areas. Many also get their fuelwood from fallow
lands. Some also collect from dense forests near their villages.
Because there is no national record on fuelwood consumption, the author used the estimates obtained
from the website of Clean House Biodiversity to describe the fuelwood situation. According to the
source, data on the quantity of fuelwood used in rural areas of Lao PDR show extreme degrees of
variation ranging from 0.75-2.92 cu m or 0.58-2.26 tonnes per capita per year. Thus, a conservative
average per capita consumption of 1.2 tonnes 10 per capita per year was used for further estimation.
According to the same source, consumption of fuelwood and charcoal by urban dwellers has been
estimated at 42,146 tonnes or 280,973 cu m per year, and firewood demand for fuelwood consuming
processing industries at 111,118 tonnes or 143,468 cu m per year. Applying current prices, household
and commercial fuelwood consumption has a total annual value of approximately Lao kip (LAK) 45.75
billion, which is equivalent to US$ 45.7 million for the use of more than 5.6 million tonnes or almost
7.5 million cu m of raw wood a year.
Given the figure, it can be said that forests are essential and provide substantial values to rural people
whose livelihoods heavily depend on forests. The GoL has promoted and invested in a number of bioenergy
schemes such as biogas and rural electricity networks that could be good alternatives to and
replacements for fuelwood at certain levels. However, since fuel wood consumption is already rooted in
Lao culture and development of other alternatives is at a slow pace, fuelwood will remain an important
energy source for the rural poor.
Commercial and Industrial Forestry
Commercial forestry is understood as the use of forest products and forest lands for commercial purposes.
There are many types of activities that can be put under commercial forestry. As examples, four different
types of activities are used by the author to discuss their contributions to poverty alleviation in this
section. These include contributions from commercial plantations, contributions from the management
of production forests, contributions from wood products and wood processing, and contributions from
forest-induced environmental services.
Commercial forest plantations
Undertaking commercial forest plantations is one of the key strategies for GoL to meet its targeted
forest cover set in its Forest Strategy 2020. In the strategy, the GoL anticipates an increase in the
coverage of industrial tree plantations up to 500,000 ha (MAF 2020). To fulfill the objective, the GoL
has strongly promoted domestic and foreign investment in forest plantations.
As a result of the promotion, the investment in commercial plantations increased sharply during 2004
10 This is a conservative estimate for rural households in the Lower Mekong Region.
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Phouthone Sophathilath