| [Back to front page] | Life on the margins Much the activity in forests happens on the forest margins. This is where the forest meets the rest of the world – especially that world’s human constituents. People who live and farm at the forest margins can do so benignly, or they can do so destructively. Indigenous communities can live for centuries at the edge of forests without causing apparent harm; newly arrived colonists can and often do stake their claims at the margins, pushing the forest back as they place more land into cultivation or pasture, sometimes in an effort to compensate for plots they have degraded through unsustainable practices. CIFOR continued its efforts in 1997 to understand the complex exchanges that take place at the edges of the forest, and to identify, understand and encourage those that are beneficial and discourage those that are destructive. Life on the margins of forests is closely identified with life on another margin; that of economic security. Much of the poverty of the tropics can be found along the interface where humans meet forests. CIFOR seeks policy options that can both protect the values of the forest and improve the lives of the people living around them. One way is through non-timber forest products (NTFPs). Millions of people rely on NTFPs to satisfy daily needs, or harvest them to earn cash. CIFOR’s work on the ‘Sustainable use and development of non-timber products’, aims to improve understanding of how people interact with the forest with a focus on NTFPs.
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