Markets Drive the Specialization Strategies of Forest Peoples

By M. Ruiz-Pérez, B. Belcher, R. Achdiawan, M. Alexiades, C. Aubertin, J. Caballero, B. Campbell, C. Clement, T. Cunningham, A. Fantini and 19 more. 2004

263 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Engagement in the market changes the opportunities and strategies of forest-related peoples. Efforts to support rural development need to better understand the potential importance of markets and the way people respond to them. To this end, we compared 61 case studies of the commercial production and trade of nontimber forest products from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The results show that product use is shaped by local markets and institutions, resource abundance, and the relative level of development. Larger regional patterns are also important. High-value products tend to be managed intensively by specialized producers and yield substantially higher incomes than those generated by the less specialized producers of less managed, low-value products. We conclude that commercial trade drives a process of intensified production and household specialization among forest peoples.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/267f7fe6d4dd88163488a681d87469b7c017a8d7

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

1. K. Schreckenberg
2. Z. Tchoundjeu

In Global and Planetary Change

1. K. Schreckenberg
2. O. Ndoye

Citations in the corpus

• DOMESTICATING INDIGENOUS FRUIT TREES AS A CONTRIBUTION TO POVERTY REDUCTION (2006, background): “Yet research into the poverty reducing role of non-timber forest products (NTFPs) has led to the recognition that many of these are no longer collected from the wild but are cultivated on farm (Ruiz-Perez et al. 2004).”