CHAPTER THREE: FORESTRY AND SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT
3.4 SMALL-SCALE COMMUNAL FORESTRY GROWERS
3.4.3 Small-scale Community Forests
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incomes (Arnold, 1995). Underwood (2014) stated that the main aim of community forestry is to assist people in their quest to solve wood supply shortages and to preserve the environment through the planting of trees.
The objectives of community woodlots can vary according to diverse requirements that involve cultural, environmental, and financial aspects. Community woodlots can be managed for forest protection, commercial use and to the benefit of households. All these aspects are important, allowing a community to enhance the livelihoods of the rural population and to empower people to plant and manage trees in a sustainable manner. The current community woodlots work towards the multi-production of fuelwood, poles, droppers and lathes for domestic use and fibre for the commercial pulp mills. The latter purpose ─ the establishment of community woodlots ─ refers to commercial community forestry. The establishment of large commercial community woodlots (up to 200 ha) results from state land that has been released to communities for their own development (Underwood, 2014). According to this practice, women are also participants in the management of this type of community forestry.
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• With the heterogeneity of a community, different groups within a community may exploit others;
• The degraded state of the forest or land owing to past destructive activities impacting on it; and
• Actions of an outside agency may not be in tune with the needs of the community (Underwood, 2014).
According to Forestry SA (2014), barriers to small-scale communal forestry growers are more prevalent in land reform projects. Most land reform projects thus far have not been successful because there has been a lack of effective post-settlement support;
a lack of beneficiary management/business/technical skills; and a lack in accessing finance for working capital (Forestry SA, 2014). Forestry SA (2014) further mentioned that the lack of skills is a major problem area in land reform projects. This study specifically focuses on whether any training or skills are provided to forestry growers by either strategic partners or government. Furthermore, the research assesses the different models provided by the strategic partners and/or government to forest growers in the Land Reform Programme, as detailed in the section below.
3.4.3.2 Benefits derived from small-scale community forestry
Small-scale community forestry has some advantages despite the disadvantages highlighted above. The benefits of small-scale community forestry are explained in detail by Underwood (2014). These advantages include job creation; establishing a long-term source of income; improved livelihoods; the empowering of poor rural people, women, and disadvantaged groups; increased supplies of forest products;
environmental greening and oxygen production; the availability of sinks for carbon; the restoration of degraded forestland; and increased biodiversity.
Small-scale communal forestry could involve a range of forest types, ranging from natural forests to secondary degraded forests to tree plantations. An example of small- scale communal forestry is the woodlot of the Mooifontein community forest in the Northwest Province that is around 200 ha and is managed by government for local communities. Peluso et al. (1994) highlighted the fact that small-scale community
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forestry projects should deliver a variety of benefits to people. The practice could have added benefits, such as non-timber products (e.g., mushrooms, fern, and honey, etc.) harvested from spaces amongst the trees, and much more. To ensure a variety of products and sustainable benefits for people engaged in small-scale communal forestry, it is vital to make attempts to remove the constraints and barriers.
3.4.3.3 Emergence of out-grower schemes
The failure of the community forests has led to the suspension of community forest programmes in most rural parts of South Africa (Ham and Theron, 1998). As the model of the community forest has declined, a new approach (the model of individual ownership) has emerged. This happened during the same period that a shift from non- industrial to industrial small-scale timber production occurred (Mahlangu and Mubangizi, 2015). The commercialisation of plantations began to attract independent small-scale growers in the early 1980s when commercial forestry companies saw an opportunity to make communities their business partners. SAPPI entered the arena of small grower schemes in 1982 and, since then, this type of scheme has picked up momentum (Ham and Theron, 1999). As a result, by 1999, four main schemes were running in KwaZulu-Natal province alone. They were SAPPI’s Project Grow, MONDI’s Khulanathi, Lima Rural Development Foundation schemes, and the South African Wattle Growers Union’s Loan Scheme (Ham and Theron, 1999).
The current democratic government of South Africa has an interest in promoting small- scale forestry growers because such initiatives have the potential to create jobs and thus deal with issues of poverty in rural areas. Commercial timber production has the potential to generate benefits at two levels (Mahlangu and Mubangizi, 2015; Harrison and Herbohn, 2002). These are the ‘upstream flow effect’ and the ‘downstream flow effect’ (Harrison and Herbohn, 2002). According to Harrison and Herbohn (2002), the upstream flow effect refers to benefits that are received, for example, from nursery operators through employment creation. On the other hand, the ‘downstreamflow effect’ includes opportunities created in the harvesting and processing industries, including tertiary processing such as furniture manufacturing (Harrison and Herbohn, 2002).
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Further aspects of out-grower schemes are discussed below under the section on forest models and land reform.