Proceedings of the International Conference on Domestication & Commercialization of Non-timber Forest Products in Agroforestry Systems, Nairobi, Kenya, 19-23 February 1996, hosted by ICRAF (International Centre for Research in Agroforestry) & others

The value of growing trees on tropical farms for subsistence, commercial sale and environmental stability has been increasingly recognized in recent decades. However, there has been little research on the market potential for nontimber tree products (NTTPs). This publication aims to provide a background on markets and methodological issues in market assessment and how they affect agroforestry and forestry projects, with reference to recent research carried out by NRI in Cameroon on NTTPs. The specific characteristics of NTTPs which make the assessment of their market potential difficult are outlined, strategic options for their development are discussed and conclusions are drawn which stress the importance of informal methods.

V. 1: Asia. Editors: Koen Kusters and Brian Belcher; V. 2: Africa. Editors: Terry Sunderland and Ousseynou Ndoye.

Large areas of the warm, humid tropics in Southeast Asia, the Pacific, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa are hilly or mountainous. Jackson and Scherr (1995) estimate that these tropical hillside areas are inhabited by 500 million people, or one-tenth of the current world population, many of whom practice subsistence agriculture. The region most affected is Asia which has the lowest area of arable land per capita. Aside from limited areas of irrigated terraces, most of the sloping land, which constitutes 60% to 90% of the land resources in many Southeast Asian countries, has been by-passed in the economic development of the region (Maglinao and Hashim, 1993). Poverty in these areas is often high, in contrast to the relative wealth of irri gated rice farms in lowland areas that benefited from the green revolution. Rapid population growth in some countries is also exacerbating the problems of hillside areas. Increasingly, people are migrating from high-potential lowland areas where land is scarce to more remote hillside areas. Such migra tion, together with inherent high population growth, is forcing a transforma tion in land use from subsistence to permanent agriculture on fragile slopes, and is creating a new suite of social, economic, and environmental problems (Garrity, 1993; Maglinao and Hashim, 1993).