Presentation And Proceedings

Date: July 4-5, 2003
Venue: Nagarkot, Nepal
Organizer: ANSAB
Language: English
Number of Pages: 21
Price: Free

Asia Network for Sustainable Agriculture and Bio-resources (ANSAB) organized a national level policy workshop on July 4–5, 2003 at Nagarkot involving widest possible range of stakeholders that represent a variety of institution including Ministry of Forest and Soil Conservation (MFSC), Department of Forests (DoF), Department of Plant Resources (DPR), Federation of Community Forest Users Nepal (FECOFUN), Himali Jadibuti Sarokar Samuha (HJSS), NTFPs promotion Public Private Alliance (PPA), Nepal NTFPs Network (NNN), and donor organizations including USAID and SNV Nepal.

The workshop was organized in order to identify policy related opportunities and policy challenges in NTFPs sub-sector, and make policy recommendation addressing social, economic and environmental concerns.

The major output of the workshop was Nagarkot declaration for NTFPs policy improvement and recommendations for further actions. The workshop came up with a need to enhance the policy initiatives that appreciates the role of NTFPs and attempts for creating conducive policy environment. The governmental body also expressed commitment to make conducive policy so that the poor and marginalized group of the society could benefit form NTFPs. Yet, there are some major issues to be improved in the policy level activities like complex collection permit on NTFPs and other legal constraints on transaction and marketing and need to formulate separate plan along with amendments in forest laws and policies. Attempts for promotion of forest and organic certification is also recommended to step forward together with fixing a reasonable timeframe for the process of registration of forest based enterprises. It is also suggested to give reasons for any delay in hand over to the prospective FUG within a specified period of time.

The workshop went perfectly interactive and productive. The Workshop was also able to scrutinize NTFPs policy issues. Major recommendations from the workshop were agreed from all sides to transform it into policy documents and to bring into practice as early as possible.