Distinguishing community forest products in the market .

Terms of reference for a collaborative project to enable consumers to better recognise community forest products. Community forestry has rarely been an economic success story until now. The limited examples of positive progress have almost always been heavily subsidised by external support agencies. This has many reasons, and amongst them are scale problems, unfamiliarity of small forest owners with market mechanisms and financial constraints. These ToRs explore solutions to make community forestry economically viable. They aim to demonstrate demand (or the lack of it), and develop options, to distinguish1 sustainable and fair community forest products for discerning consumers in the North, thus allowing trade partners to seek identified and selected markets for these products. Whether this is an achievable aim is highly dependent on the collaboration that can be achieved between various stakeholders, and on the creativeness of the involved people. However, with continuous concern over widespread poverty (not in the least in the Millennium Development Goals), it can be seen as a mission to undertake, without knowing the outcome.