The natural management of tropical forests for timber and non-timber products

The term 'non-timber forest products' (NTFPs) describes a wide range of products, including medicinal plants, fibres, resins, latexes, fruits, foods, construction materials, and bushmeat. The plant products may be taken from a variety of life forms and plant parts, including reproductive propagules, plant exudates, vegetative structures, roots and bark. NTFPs may be harvested for subsistence consumption, for small local markets, or for regional or even international trade. They may have long histories in traditional resource use, or they may be recently developed, and have applications of primary importance to industrial cultures. NTFPs may be sourced from high-diversity primary forest, low diversity 'oligarchic' forests, or secondary forests. These forests may be in various states of repair, and may exist in extractive reserves, indigenous reserves, communally-held and managed forests, privately-owned lands, reserves demarcated for conservation purposes, timber concessions, or government lands. NTFPs may be harvested from areas with high population densities with well developed labour and trade patterns, or in areas that are sparsely populated. Harvesters may be rural peoples (in which case they might be indigenous, long-term settlers of mixed ethnicity, or recent immigrants from other rural areas or urban centres), or teams of individuals from urban areas. These harvesters mayor may not operate under traditional systems of resource management and harvesting controls. Products might be consumed in rural areas or urban centres. Trade patterns may be complex, with a variety of intermediaries, or fairly simple. This is all to say that when we speak of 'non-timber forest products' (a term which in itself has been questioned, due to the implied primacy of timber forest products), we are speaking of many things (Padoch et al., 1992; Pendleton, 1992; Vasquez and Gentry, 1989) .