Abstract
Quantifying the contribution of forest income to household’s total income, especially the poorest, is important to understand rural livelihoods, causes of poverty and designing effective development and conservation strategies. Based on a large-scale household investigation of 1495 rural households of 82 villages in 7 provinces in China in 2014–2015, this study used descriptive statistical analysis and built multilevel models to explain individual heterogeneity. Results showed that: (1) the poorest households are the less dependent on non-farm income than other households due to fewer non-farm work opportunities; (2) forest income is important for all households, although poorest ones relied more on forests; (3) the average forest income of households in the richest group is three times as much as that of households in the poorest group; (4) forest income can be increased with more land accessible to the poor and fairer harvest quota applying system. Improving roads condition and increasing forest cooperatives increase household forest income as well. The findings of this paper will be useful in designing alternative policies to alleviate poverty and protect forest resources.
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Notes
The reform guarantees farmers the long-term and stable rights to manage the collective forestland and own the forest property; these rights have inspired farmers’ enthusiasm to manage their forests and have improved the farmers’ livelihoods (He and Zhu 2014).
KPFPs include the Sloping Land Conversion Program (SLCP), the Desertification Combating Program around Beijing and Tianjin (DCBT), the Wildlife Conservation and Nature Reserve Program (WCNR), the Industrial Timber Plantation Program (ITPP), and the Shelterbelt Development Program (SBDP).
For additional detail about PEN, see its website at http://www1.cifor.org/pen.
Forests in China are divided into two categories—public welfare forests and commercial forests. Most of the public welfare forests are given priority in terms of protection, and logging in them is forbidden. The government compensates the households that own public welfare forests for their losses.
The SLCP was instituted to stop the farming of land that is steeply slope or is prone to soil erosion and to promote the planting of trees instead. The SLCP introduced a fixed-payment incentive mechanism to compensate rural households that participate.
An economic forest (cash tree) is a type of forest that produces mainly fruits, edible oils, industrial raw materials, medicinal herbs, and other non-wood forest products.
The main wild resources gathered are Chinese herbal medicines, such as Chinese caterpillar fungus, unibract fritillary bulb, rhizoma coptidis, rhizoma gastrodiae, grifola, eucommia bark, poria cocos, and honeysuckle.
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Acknowledgements
For their constructive suggestions and help in this research, we are grateful to Professor Yaoqi Zhang from School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences, Auburn University and Chunping Mei, Ph.D. from Antwerp University. The Natural Science Foundation of China (71373024) and Social Science Project of China supported this research (11&ZD042).
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Wei, D., Ben, M., Bo, S. et al. Dependence of the Poor on Forest Resources: Evidence from China. Small-scale Forestry 16, 487–504 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11842-017-9366-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11842-017-9366-1