| Globally, forest management remains focused on timber; yet, as concern about rural poverty, deforestation, and sustainable development emerges, so NTFPs' crucial role in rural development and resource conservation has been recognized. NTFPs constitute a safety net for forest-adjacent people, who, having collected NTFPs for centuries, depend on them for subsistence and cash income. Bangladesh's Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) is a case in point, as its indigenous peoples survive in precisely this way. Given this dependence, establishing better approaches to NTFP management for rural development and conservation has become a vital issue. There is great concern, too, that initiatives to commercialize NTFPs be designed so as not to encourage even more overharvesting than is currently taking place.;This research takes its place in this conversation about conserving natural resources and improving local people's livelihoods. Its purpose is threefold: to establish site-specific NTFP-livelihood linkages and to investigate the problems and potential of using NTFPs to sustain and improve livelihoods, and on this basis to conceptualize initiatives for supporting sustainability and higher incomes for local people in the long term. As there is little research on Bangladesh's use of NTFPs, this study's central research question is both fundamental and far-reaching in nature: How could NTFPs be better utilized to improve the livelihoods of forest-adjacent communities and to achieve the goal of conserving forest resources?;This study has been conceptualized through a research framework focused on sustainable livelihoods to achieve the research goals of improving forest-adjacent peoples' livelihoods and conserving forest resources. Instrumental to pursuing the research question was a mixed method that involved both quantitative and qualitative approaches, including the participatory rural appraisal tools of structured questionnaire interviews targeting households and NTFP-market stakeholders, focus group discussions, key informant interviews, and field observations. An entire year of numeric and qualitative field data was collected, and statistical methods along with NTFP production-to-consumption system (PCS) analysis were used to compile and analyze the data.;The study's results confirmed that forest-adjacent communities depend on diverse types of NTFPs for their livelihoods, and that the poor are more dependent than are the rich. Analysis showed that the households' average NTFP-related income is much higher than their timber income, as the forest areas though much degraded still yield some NTFPs. A regression model showed that a household's NTFP income could be estimated from how many members it has and the value of its implements and furniture. Noteworthy, too, is that females collect most of the NTFPs for their households and that most of the time the households spend collecting NTFPs is dedicated to those that provide food, which, therefore, warrant special attention for subsistence-oriented NTFP promotion and conservation. Various factors constrain NTFP markets, among which are insufficient transport facilities, lack of financial capital, and shortage of market information in the absence of any market information system (MIS). The villagers' market knowledge of most NTFPs is limited, in large part due to various socioeconomic factors. NTFP domestication initiatives are few and organizational efforts to develop NTFP-based entrepreneurship are almost nonexistent; yet, most of the villagers expressed interest in such interventions, seeing in them a ways to improve earnings. The results also established that NTFPs of CHT are being overharvested and that, even at its current level, NTFP commercialization is accelerating resource depletion mainly because of undefined land and property rights, financial crises experienced by the villagers, and overpopulation. Moreover, analysis of five NTFP market chains showed that the NTFP-market stakeholders' vertical linkages are stronger than the horizontal linkages, and there is little NTFP cultivation or investment. NTFP stakeholders' average NTFP incomes show great disparities that are not proportional to differences in time, labor, and capital invested. Overall, the research findings indicated that there is a wide margin for improving NTFP management in order to meet development and conservation objectives. Some key interventions include defining land and property rights, making NTFP-specific plans, effectively enforcing rules, developing NTFP entrepreneurship with domestication support, establishing a MIS, and having a people-oriented forest-management approach. |
