Forest Governance Learning Group - Vietnam: Draft Work Plan 2006

Supporting Poverty Alleviation through Community Forestry Draft Work Plan 24 August 2006.
The focus of FGLG in Vietnam will be on sharing experience and learning on poverty alleviation through community forestry (CF). The focus is on poverty alleviation because it has been one of the major concerns in Vietnamese forest sector. Over the last decade,
Vietnam has made important progress in reducing the number of people living under poverty line, from 58.2% in 1993 to 24.1% in 2004, implying a reduction of more than half of the population living in poverty in 11 years. In the forestry sector, however, it is still unclear to what extent forestry has contributed to lifting poor people out of poverty and the impacts of forestry on the poor have been vague.
In recent years, attention to poverty reduction in the forestry sector has been strengthened. With the approval of the national Comprehensive Poverty Reduction and Growth Strategy (CPRGS) in 2002, a challenge arises for the forestry sector of how to identify concrete actions to contribute to the national poverty reduction goal. In a recent effort to prepare the National Forest Strategy (NFS) 2006-2020, an attempt has been made to include
poverty reduction in forestry sector development direction. As part of this undertaking, a research entitled “Forestry, Poverty Reduction and Rural Livelihoods in Vietnam” has been commissioned to review the contribution of the forestry sector to poverty reduction and to prepare specific recommendations to integrate poverty reduction measures.
Findings from the research show that the challenges for the forestry sector to deal with poverty reduction include provision of legal rights to local people and promotion of different forms of forest management by local people.