Contribution of Forestry to Poverty Alleviation - APFNet

labor. The respondents with the lowest incomes among the group of respondents, who also have the
least landholdings and livestock, depend on pipla the most to generate cash income for their needs. The
farmers in this group also depend on remittances they get from family members who have left their
villages to work elsewhere.
Although pipla is a major source of income for the farmers, they also engaged in livestock raising, and
only one-third of the respondents belonging to the high- and medium-income categories expressed
willingness to grow and register pipla in their own land. These are the farmers who own lands,
although the land holdings of the middle-income farmers are mostly tsheri and mostly located far
from the villages. The low-income farmers derive the highest share of income from pipla but own
limited lands.
Challenges in improving the contribution of pipla
Most farmers recognize the need to improve their capacities in collecting, processing, and marketing
pipla so that they can maximize their profit and sustain their resource base. Of these three areas of
limitations in pipla production, one-half of the respondents identified their current unsustainable and
unorganized collection practices as the main drawback, while one-third identified marketing challenges,
and the rest, limited processing skills.
Many of the farmers see the need to establish community rules on proper collection practices for
more organized and sustainable harvesting of pipla. Because pipla has a high commercial value in the
market, farmers tend to compete among themselves in collecting pipla berries. Ideally, pipla should be
collected when the berries mature, but there are farmers who want to pick ahead of the others, even if
the berries are still premature. Some farmers uproot the plant, putting to waste the small berries. The
DoFPS developed guidelines for the proper harvesting of pipla, which the farmers need to collectively
adopt and commit to follow.
The farmers are also concerned about marketing as the current practice is not organized and does
not fetch the most favorable price for the farmers. In the early 1990s, the relatively well-off farmers
at first were able to fetch higher prices than the poorer farmers because they did not involve the
middlemen in selling their harvest. The farmers recalled that, in 1996, the prices improved for
the poorer farmers as well with the entry of other middlemen from other places that allowed for
competition in buying prices. Still, the poorer farmers tended to obtain lower cash income from
pipla. Some of them bartered pipla with other products, such as rice and sheets of cloth, while others
took advance payments from the middlemen; thus, they could not negotiate with the middlemen
for higher prices. The market value of pipla could have been higher than the present price had the
farmers not resorted to adulteration.
Many of the low-income farmers are generally forced to sell their collection to the middlemen since
they cannot afford to bring their produce to the distant market outlet and, in many cases, they already
tie their future harvests to middlemen as payment for their cash advances. Sometimes the low-income
famers cannot compete with high-income farmers in collecting pipla since the latter exert some control
over the market. In some areas, pipla grows in tsheri and pasturelands owned by the other farmers and
are not accessible to low-income farmers. Some of the poor farmers, however, collect pipla for the welloff
farmers and are paid for their labor on a daily wage basis.
Farmers process pipla berries by drying these under the sun. Direct sun-drying is done by spreading
the pipla on the ground to maintain the quality. During continuous rain, pipla is oven-dried, which is
a faster way to dry pipla than sun-drying. However, the smoke can cause the color of pipla to change,
thereby reducing its quality. Sun drying is generally preferred to oven-drying since it is cheaper and
less laborious as it does not require fuelwood. Poor farmers often store their pipla collection for a few
weeks until it is sold to the middlemen. Some better-off farmers can store their collected pipla for as
long as one year while waiting for favorable prices.
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