Harvesting natural products can help beat poverty

EVERY day, people around the world harvest natural products like fungi, plants, bark, flowers, honey and nuts. These non-timber forest products, as they are known, can play an important role – particularly for people living in rural areas.

Products like honey and nuts can be sold. Plants and plant fibre can be used to create furniture, cloth and crafts; herbs processed to make herbal remedies and leaves and flowers sold for ornamental uses. All this contributes to income generation and is a valuable resource for alleviating poverty in rural communities.

Yet Non-timber Forest Products (or NTFPS) don’t often feature in discussions about poverty reduction and alleviation. One of the reasons for this is probably the lack of qualitative studies on the topic: the kind which features stories from people who have used them to escape poverty. Users’ voices haven’t been heard enough to help scholars and policymakers understand the links between these products and poverty alleviation, and to harness these in poverty reduction strategies.

In our new book published by Springer, Poverty Reduction Through Non-timber Forest Products, we have tried to fill this gap. Interviewees from Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru, Brazil, Portugal, Italy, Nepal, India, China, Uganda, Swaziland, Malawi, Cameroon, Mozambique and elsewhere shared their stories of using various products to create small enterprises and earn money.

Non-timber Forest Products are dwindling worldwide; climate change and overuse of land are contributing to this trend. But such products are still common in many parts of the world and they should be studied and considered in governments’ poverty reduction plans.

There are many ways in which Non-timber Forest Products can be used as an income source. Several approaches are examined and profiled in our book.

In Uganda, for instance, we focused on a small-scale women’s industry called Easy Afric Design which uses bark cloth made from the fig tree to create handbags and folders.

The women had to overcome the stigma of using bark cloth as a raw material, as it has historically been used for burials. To show other women that the material could be used for more than its traditional purpose, founder Sarah Nakisanze wrapped the bark cloth around her as a skirt.

Now, several rural women work for the company from their homes, making products from bark cloth. Many have been able to save money to send their children to secondary school and to purchase assets.

By investing their earnings into children’s education, many of the people we interviewed were looking to ease inter-generational poverty and improve younger generations’ opportunities.

A deeper understanding of how Non-timber Forest Products can become income sources, as provided through people’s own stories, helps to inform poverty reduction strategies in ways that statistics and data can’t.

Pullanikkatil is the co-director of the Sustainable Futures in Africa (SFA) Network (Funded by Scottish Funding Council and allocated to the University of Glasgow)