Being directly dependent on the forest resource, they also have the most to gain from forest survival over the long term.

The inherent difficulties of policing, the recognition that local communities can have a positive effect on forests, and concerns about the poverty of forest communities have led governments throughout Asia to become interested in alternatives to exclusion. This is especially true as demographic pressures on forests increase, forest resources decrease, and conflict over remaining resources continues to rise. In many areas, forest-dependent people have responded to resource degradation by initiating independent forest management organizations. Forest agencies now are more willing than ever to work with these groups, and to explore new means of managing forest areas that both achieve conservation objectives and provide economic opportunities to local people. It has become increasingly clear that, under community-based management, social equity, economic efficiency, and ecological sustainability can be compatible.

History of Ford Foundation Involvement in Community Forestry in Asia

The Ford Foundation's interest in forest communities and forest land management in Asia grew out of its earlier work in agriculture and rural development. Increases in crop production associated with the Green Revolution of the 1970s were concentrated in irrigated lowland areas having little in common with the complex systems of rainfed agriculture used by farmers in hilly upland areas that were commonly classified by government agencies as forest lands. Concerns about the equity and ecological effects of the Green Revolution also led the Foundation to increase its attention to poverty, social justice, and environmental sustainability, including substantial attention to the management of irrigation systems. In the 1980s, the focus on the link between natural resource management and rural poverty alleviation led the Foundation to establish the Rural Poverty and Resources program. The new strategy was to increase villagers' access to and control over natural resources while providing technical alternatives to increase the productivity of those resources.

An early program in the Philippines demonstrated the importance of institutional change in the government agencies responsible for forest management. Experience gained in the mid-1970s from three Foundation-supported projects to help upland people improve the management of forest lands revealed the centrality of the Bureau of Forest Development (BFD) in determining the range of options for assisting upland farmers and for improving the ecological stability of forest lands. Despite the BFD's reputation for being unsympathetic to farmers, the Foundation, in 1980,