A review of CBFM enterprise development

SUMMARY: This paper proposes community forest management agreement (CFMA) and industrial forest management agreement (IFMA) arrangements in the Philippines as a mechanism for increasing environmental protection, community income-levels, industrial forest production, and government revenues. The authors stress the need to clearly distinguish between CFMA and IFMA arrangements, their problems and different objectives. CFMA is intended to assist local communities and is best designed for generally lower value areas that are important for local communities. IFMA is best designed for the larger and more valuable areas where large-scale private operations can successfully invest and obtain a commercial return. Some of the prominent recommendations for successful forest management include: Keep the CFMA and IFMA contracts and their monitoring simple, while creating as many economic incentives for sustainable management as possible; Shift the Philippine Department of Environment and Natural Resource (DENR) management from command and control forest regulation to transparent environmental impact monitoring to reduce regulatory costs; Shift DENR field personnel away from responsibilities for forest inventories, timber management plans, log scaling, and log fee collection. Instead, they should assist with expanded forestry extension and environmental impact monitoring; Transfer the costs previously borne by DENR (such as forest inventories) to contract holders; Incorporate economic incentives into the design of CFMAs and IFMAs so that the contract holders can be reasonably confident that they will receive a positive return from their investments; and CFMA and IFMA holders must also be assured of their land use rights, including the right to change land uses and to transfer their tenure to others in response to changing market conditions.