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ENERGIA News Issue 2, April 1997

Women and Social Forestry in Sri Lanka

Anoja Wickramasinghe

The Community Forestry Project (CFP), initiated in Sri Lanka with financing from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in 1982, was the first effort of the state in introducing social forestry. It was implemented in 8 districts. At first glance, due to its heavy concentration on the provision of firewood, which is the primary form of domestic energy in Sri Lanka, this programme appears as a strategy identified for women.

In a ‘farmer's woodlots’ scheme, selected farmers were allocated about 0.2-0.4 hectares of state lands on a 25-year lease agreement. By the end of 1992, 1861 families had been enrolled and the total area under woodlots was 632 acres. But after 13 years of implementation, the programme was performing poorly, as a survey carried out in Illukkumbura village in Badulla district demonstrates. Participation is low, and moreover many of the trees remain unharvested after all this time.

Traditional Practice

Traditionally, men and women have always been engaged in procuring planting materials, in raising nurseries, and in planting and managing trees and tree-based agricultural systems. Trees and tree-based systems are part and parcel of the survival strategy of the people, and the mosaics of forests in the landscape are the creations of the people, to which women have contributed tremendously. Socially accepted tree planting and management systems from long ago, have been means of meeting people's needs, of conservation of resources including biodiversity, of land management and development, and of timber production. This indigenous social forestry shows that both men and women are equipped with knowledge and experience from which social forestry should have begun.

Social forestry for whom?

In the farmer's woodlot programme, the lease of the plot was in practically all cases in the name of the male head of the household. Women were expected to get access to assets as family members. The procuring of fuelwood is however usually performed by women and hence firewood can be contextualised as a woman's practical gender need. But instead of formulating the programme with a broad understanding of women's concerns, the forestry sector had simply assumed the programme would directly benefit women, because it had been aimed at solving rural wood energy problems.

The species selected by the forest officers for the woodlots was Eucalyptus, and women had no opportunity to make decisions on this. As traditional forestry practitioners, women usually aim for multiple outputs and service functions of trees. Species that they select for specific locations are characterised by a set of such functions. Their interest in selecting species which provide food/fruit, mulch, fodder and various types of timber in addition to firewood is quite consistent. In fact most fuelwood is derived from coconut palms in home gardens and from branch pruning of a variety of other species.

The knowledge of trees and their uses that women have accumulated through social interaction, observation and experience, was not tapped in the woodlot programme. The concentration on monoculture for the single function of fuelwood production resulted in the loss of women's active engagement and exclusion of their priorities.

The labour required to establish farmer's woodlots has also been a crucial factor. As farmer's woodlots were introduced on a family basis, all members of the family were expected to be involved. The question of availability of the various members was neglected. The forestry officers argued that gender specific features were not required, because on the one hand legal ownership of the plot was not the concern of women, and on the other, the family-focused programme would provide equal opportunities for women.

Traditionally, the labour intensive agricultural tasks such as planting, weeding and construction of stone bunds for soil conservation, have been performed by women. These practices were carried over into social forestry. Men dug holes for planting the seedlings, following instructions of the forest officers, and were the point of communication of the Forest Department with the family, as heads of the households. The rest of the work (planting, weeding, management) was done by women. In the minds of the forest officers this was fair because the products of the woodlot (fuelwood) were intended to benefit women, even though the lands were leased out in the name of the male head of the household. It had the effect however that communication between the forest officers and women, who were doing most of the work, has been extremely poor.

It also had the effect that it is the men who officially exercise links with the forestry office, and decisions about woodlot are taken by the men who also make up the village forestry organisations. The very few women represented in these organisations are heads-of -household in their own right. The result has been that women's gender specific priorities have been ignored and the state has reaffirmed them as passive beneficiaries.

The role of incentives

To encourage participation by farmers, a package of incentives was attached to the woodlots programme, including free seedlings and food aid under the World Food Programme. Many officers argue that incentives are necessary because woodlots do not provide immediate benefits. Without the seedlings, the woodlots would however have become stands of mixed trees. In reality farmers considered the food incentives payments for their labour. They have been the means of securing family involvement to convert degraded land into forest stands without appointing forest guards and without hiring labour. People participated for the sake of the incentives without any commitment to the programme.

Conclusions

By adding the words “people”, “community” and “society” to the top-down forestry programme, the state programme was trying to satisfy the donors. The superiority complex of the forestry professionals is evident in their attempt to meet fuelwood needs without consulting women. The non-social nature of the social forestry introduced by the state, and in particular the lack of understanding of gender issues, has resulted in a failure in the goal of providing fuelwood.

Analysis of women's perception in Illukumbura village reveals that:

• the farmer's woodlot programme deviates tremendously from forestry as normally practised there; growing species specially for fuelwood is contrary to tree related culture, and Eucalyptus is difficult to integrate in traditional agro-forestry combinations due to the low rate of decomposition of leaf matter on the ground;
• women's engagement has been limited to provision of manpower;
• there has been a lack of consultation in formulating and designing the programme and in identifying the strategy and species for planting;
• the programme has been externally conceived and instructions have been enforced by forestry officers;
• the use values of (k)tarpentine (Eucalyptus spp.) has been stressed by forest officers, but local women lack confidence in it as a means to relieve fuelwood scarcity.

The need for women to play a greater role in planning, decision making and management in order to achieve sustainability of social forestry is not fully understood.

References

• Bharathie, K.P. (1985), Stabilization of rural communities through community forestry in Sri Lanka. In: Rao, Y.S., Vergara, N.T. & Lovelace, G. (eds.), Community Forestry: Socio-Economic Aspects, FAO (RAPA), Bangkok, Thailand
• Skutsch, M.M. (1990), Social Forestry in Integrated Rural Development Planning Sri Lanka, Field Document No.24, FAO, RWEDP, GCP/RAS/131/NET, Bangkok, Thailand
• Wickramasinghe, Anoja (1994), Deforestation, Women and Forestry, The International Books, The Netherlands.

Anoja Wickramasinghe is a professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka. She is actively involved in research on community based forestry and is the author of the book Deforestation, Women and Forestry, which was published by the institute for Development Research at the University of Amsterdam in 1994.