Forest Products from the Western Ghats, India

by University of Massachusetts/Boston

What's at Stake?

The Western Ghats are one of the most biologically diverse areas in South Asia. The Biligiri Rangan Hills contain elephants, gaurs, sambars, wild pigs, sloth bears, barking deer and over 900 species of flowering plants. This richness led to the area being declared a Wildlife Sanctuary in 1974. The biodiversity of the sanctuary is threatened however, by human pressures, which possibly include over harvesting of forest products by both local Solig communities and outsiders.

VGKK, a local NGO that has been working with the Soliga communities since 1981, is trying to meet these threats by establishing several new enterprises. Our project is centered around extraction of non-timber forest products (NTFPs) by Soliga tribes. These people have inhabited the Biligiri Rangan (BR) Hills region in South India for millennia. Approximately 4,500 Soligas live in 25 podus, or settlements, scattered throughout and on the fringes of the sanctuary. Traditionally, they engaged in shifting agriculture and hunting, and also collected a wide range of NTFPs. Shifting agriculture has been discouraged since the late 19th century, and was completely banned, along with hunting, with the declaration of much of the area as the Biligiri Ranganswamy Temple (BRT) Wildlife Sanctuary in 1974.

Settled agriculture is practiced by Soligas on the lands allotted to the households, but extraction of non-timber forest products is the major source of income. The Soligas harvest NTFPs and sell these to a cooperative marketing society, the Large-scale Adivasi (tribal) Multi-purpose Societies (LAMPS), which hold the harvesting rights on lease from the Forest Department. The LAMPS were created as vehicles for tribal development, particularly to ensure full return on the collection of NTFPs to which the tribals were given sole rights. Traditionally, NTFPs purchased from the Soliga communities were auctioned by the LAMPS to the highest bidder for processing and subsequent marketing.

Our preliminary studies indicate that more than 50% of the Soliga's total income is derived from NTFPs, yet they derive inadequate returns from the NTFPs due to a lack of value additions at the point of harvest. Furthermore, the Soligas have little control over harvest with respect to amount, location, and timing of the collection.

The BCN project is designed to increase the economic stake of the Soligas in conservation of their biotic resources and to increase their capacity to ensure the ecological sustainability of these resources and the larger ecosystem by strengthening Soliga organizations. We are accomplishing this by creating a Soliga-operated enterprise to process several of the extracted products at the collection site and marketing them directly, in order to capture a greater share of the final value. Sustainability will be achieved, on the one hand, by establishing a community-based biological monitoring and feedback system that would regulate NTFP extraction and ecosystem health and, by assisting the local community to gain better access to and control over biotic resources.

Thus, the enterprise will ultimately include not only the processing-cum-marketing unit but also a) a biological unit to ensure sustainable utilization of the biotic resources, and b) a community outreach unit to ensure broad-based participation of the local communities and an equitable flow of benefits to the community. Specifically, the processing-cum-marketing unit will purchase at least four NTFPs in raw form from the LAMPS: honey, nelli, soapnut, and shikekai; it will then process and market the products so as to capture the highest possible fraction of the final consumer prices. The project was formulated in collaboration with Vivekananda Girijana Kalyana Kendra (VGKK), an NGO in the BR Hills region devoted to Soliga welfare.

Successes and Challenges
"OK...So What?"

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