The project “Local livelihood improvement through sustainable land use system at Phu Mau village, Nam Dong district” was started in 9/2008 by funding from Ecosystem Grant Program/IUCN Netherlands. This project was designed to secure local people livelihood with diverse alternatives for income generation through maintaining highly productive natural resources. Three major components of this project were (i) create a sustainable land use system based on village resource mapping and landuse models; (ii) maintain good forest cover to provide basic environmental services via forest restoration and conservation; and (iii) replicate good models of integrated land use systems in other areas of Nam Dong district.

The project has fulfilled all its objectives at most. In the first objective, the project has supported Nam Dong district to allocate about 800 ha of natural forest to 9 farmer groups of Phu Mau, Xuan Hoa, and Xuan Phu villages and 22 households in Ha An village. All farmer groups actively participated in forest survey to write up village forest management plan. Especially, the project has supported to establish 4 effective land-use models namely Rattan restoration, honey-bee keeping, bamboo plantation, and porcupine-raising. In the second objective, the Phu Mau forest was mapped with clear boundary and signboards. The local villages established one nursery garden to produce about 10,000 seedlings of native tree species. In total, the consultant experts provided 7 training courses on nursery garden, forest fire prevention, simple silvicultural practices, etc. We have written 8 guidelines for each training course so that other farmer groups can use to manage their allocated forest. In the third objective, we facilitated to establish 9 farmer groups with 80 households and manage 612 ha. These groups were supported with all training courses mentioned above. Besides, three out of these 9 groups received a supporting community-development-fund based on their business initiatives on land use models. All activities in 3 objectives were connected each other to assert for a sustainable forest management system in Huong Phu commune and Nam Dong district afterward.

In short, the EGP/IUCN funded project has helped Huong Phu communes to achieve 3 major issues in forest management namely technical, financial, and institutional aspects. These can be seen as the most fundamental conditiosn for a CFM model to sustain in long-term operation.

However, one critical issue was raised during the final workshop: the recipient of forest allocation (farmer groups and individual households) seem not to be supported by the law enforcement force (i.e. forest protection officers, commune forestry officer). This may create a disincentive for local people to continue protect their own forest.

To keep project achivement, the follow-up activities should focus on how to create a dialogue where local communities, district FPD, district/commune PPC can sit together to discuss on ‘supporting local communities on legal aspects of protecting forest’. This issue is really important when local people start earn benefits from their efforts of protecting and developing forest resources. Otherwise, they will loose their interests in village forest protectioin and management and forest become ‘open access’ which is subject to deforestation quickly.

CORENARM