Chhattisgarh Forest Department
NWFP Certification
Components
of Certification
What
is usually understood under "forest certification" is the addition of
several activities, which have all their own rules and guides:
Certification
Standardization
Accreditation
Logo use
(labelling)
Certification
is a potential market based instrument to contribute towards improving forest
management and at the same time giving an assurance that a product or service is
in conformity with certain specified standards. There are two main components of
certification:
Certifying the standards of forest management
Certifying the products from these forests.
The
first involves an investigation of all the aspects relating to forests including
social, economic and environmental conditions and assessing how the management
of these is being addressed. The process may then include the second component,
that of product certification and the associated labeling.
Currently,
a wide range of actions are underway concerning certification. Although main
emphasis to date has been on timber and timber products, attention has recently
expanded to include pulp and paper products. However, nowhere in the world has
there been any concerted effort to instill the process of certification for the
non-wood forest
(NWFP/MFP) produce. Since a wide array of these non-wood forest products
is brought straight from the forests, it has been extremely difficult to trace
the source of origin of the produce and to know whether the mode of harvest was
not environmentally hazardous and that the produce available is not responsible
for any damages done at the social, economic or environmental levels. Thus,
there is an urgent need of developing a certification of non-wood forest
products too.
Apart
from being sourced from the forest areas, some of the non-wood forest produces
are also being adopted under agro-forestry models wherein, the farmers are
cultivating non-wood forest produce species on their farmlands. Encouraged by
the lucrative economic returns, the farmers are cultivating these NWFP on a
commercial scale. Various agro-based institutions are developing new strategies
to maximize yield of these produces through substantial use of chemical
fertilizers, inorganic substances etc. The green-revolution in India has
prompted most of these agrarian communities to switch to chemical based farming
so that they can get maximum output from their lands. This has resulted in
growing concern regarding the credibility and quality of these inorganically
grown produces. Most of these high priced produces are used for medicinal
purposes and the buyers constitute both large and small pharmaceutical
companies, traders who sell these produces to the upward market and so on.
However, at present, there has been very little concern over the hazards
inflicted upon by these chemical fertilizers.
Secondly,
the present management or trade trend is not laying any emphasis on the process
of harvesting of these products both from the forests or the agricultural lands.
The primary forest produce gatherers go to the forests and harvest the forest
produce without giving much consideration to the sustainable harvesting levels
and techniques.
They have little regard and information regarding the regeneration and
health of the forests. Thus, there is a need to check the process of harvesting
as well as building capacity of the forest produce collectors and farmers as
well as developing framework for promoting certification of NWFP including
Medicinal, Dye and Aromatic Plants (MADPs).
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