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| Does NTFP Certification Assure Sustainable Harvesting and
Better Benefit Sharing?
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| Prodyut Bhattacharya1 |
| Abstract |
NTFP Certification is a voluntary market
tool that attracts “green consumerism”
by ensuring sustainability of
the resource. However, it is still in a
nascent stage and largely untested.
But there is no doubt that it has great
potential for global business. NTFP
availability, utilization, commercialization,
exploitation, management
practices, policies and tenure systems
in different parts of India vary widely,
making the development of any generic
standard for certification a great
challenge even though many of the
principles, criteria, indicators and verifiers
are universally applicable for
certification.
The harvest of NTFP has come under
increasing scrutiny from certification
programmes because of the key role
that it plays in sustainable forest management
and community benefit
worldwide. NTFPs present many new
challenges and opportunities in certification
due to the wide range of management
practices prevalent in the
country and the difficulty in monitoring
their harvest and processing. The
emergence of certification as a conservation
strategy has triggered a vigorous
debate over its role in sustainable
forestry vis-à-vis the role of traditional
approaches to forest conservation.
The purpose of this paper is to examine the role and contribution of
forest certification in sustainable
NTFP management and how communities
can benefit out of it. |
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