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Miombo woodlands - opportunities and barriers to sustainable forest management

Miombo woodland is the most extensive tropical seasonal woodland and dry forest formation in Africa, with seventy-five million rural people and 25 million urban dwellers relying on miombo for their livelihoods. Poverty reduction in the miombo countries remains problematic, and deforestation is high. We describe how opportunities for miombo product use are strongly determined by biogeography and evolutionary history. There are a number of opportunities to manage and benefit from miombo woodlands: (1) forests are still a valuable resource; (2) resource rights are shifting to local people; (3) new approaches to integrating conservation and development are emerging; and (4) forest markets are emerging and expanding. However, there are a number of barriers to sustainable use and benefit from miombo. We recognise eight key barriers: (1) low inherent productivity; (2) managing for multiple products; (3) disenabling forest policy; (4) marginalisation of the forestry sector; (5) cash constraints pushing decisions towards high preferences for rapid exploitation; (6) low margins and high management and transaction costs; (7) weak local organisations; and (8) weak national organisations. The miombo countries are part of the ‘bottom billion’ (Collier 2007), the 50-60 failing states with a population of a billion whose problems defy traditional approaches to alleviating poverty. Poverty is not going to go away through any simple solution. Miombo woodland management and use will not be part of the solution in getting people out of the ‘bottom billion’, i.e. miombo will not contribute significantly to poverty elimination. However, in the face of prolonged poverty, miombo woodlands are crucial for poverty mitigation. Miombo woodlands can bolster livelihoods, act as safety nets in times of emergency and serve as gap fillers in times of seasonal shortages. They also shore up livelihoods in the face of HIV/AIDS and may indeed prove more reliable resources than dryland agricultural resources in the face of climate change. The crucial role of miombo for poverty mitigation is in spite of the fact that miombo is of low productivity and is not well-endowed with high value timber resources. This makes them less interesting to commercial concerns, but what matters is their high local value to tens of millions of poor households. 1 Centre for International Forestry Research, Bogor 2 Charles Darwin University, Darwin 3 Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Oslo 4 University Eduardo Mondlane, Maputo