Managing the Miombo Woodlands of Southern Africa Policies, incentives and options
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2Methods2.1ReviewThis work included a literature review to identify some key products that could be used to illustrate the role of forests and forestry in livelihoods and the national economy. Unfortunately, there are no comprehensive national datasets for examining the role of forests for subsistence and cash income, but we used case studies and data from CSO and the Forestry Department. 2.2Household surveyThe main source of data to gain an overview of the contribution of forest products to rural livelihoods was a household survey conducted in 2005. A total of 435 households in eight rural villages were sampled. The villages were selected from four rural districts in three of the nine provinces of Zambia (Table 2). To ensure that the most visible and important forests products were captured and analyzed, we first itemized the key forest products harvested by households in different parts of the country and then selected three of the nine provinces to study. The villages surveyed in each of the sampled provinces were purposefully selected to capture diversity, varying abundance and varying levels of use of forest products. Different forests and woodland conditions, and different levels of maturity, host different non-wood forests products. To record this, we included communities that have access to disturbed and those that have access to relatively undisturbed forests. In the Northern Province, we surveyed two villages in Kasama, namely Paul Kalemba and Nseluka. The first is an important charcoal producing area, whereas the second was previously important for caterpillar harvesting, but now the caterpillars are scarce due to land-use changes. In the same province, two other villages in Chief Kopa’s area in Mpika district were sampled, where caterpillar trade is a huge source of income. Markets and access to markets influence the value and utilization of forest products for commercial purposes. Thus we also included households living around the Katanino Local Forest Reserve, in a more urban province (Copperbelt). The households supply most of the charcoal and mushrooms in the Ndola urban markets. In Mumbwa district in Central Province, three villages were surveyed (Lutale, Chibuluma, Nalusanga), mainly to capture information on small-scale timber operations (pit-sawing).
The survey captured information on all sources of income, both cash and subsistence in all areas of activity: forestry, subsistence agriculture, cottage industries, formal and informal wage employment, transfers and remittances. Enumerators were undergraduate students from the University of Zambia. They were selected based on their fluency in local languages, knowledge and prior experience with research on rural livelihoods. In addition to conducting the face-to-face interviews with local communities, focus group discussions with district forests extension officers and local communities, and a snapshot survey of local forest prices were conducted. The surveys conducted are limited by their single household visit (as compared to the PEN methodology – Angelsen et al.., in prep), but were deemed suitable given the wide geographic coverage that was desirable. Medicinal plants could not be captured in the survey, given the secretive nature of much of their use. We compute forest dependency as the ratio of total forest income to total household income, as in Fisher (2004). Total household income comprises the sum of cash income (part of which is from forests), net gifts/transfers and subsistence consumption (from both agriculture and forests). Total forest income here includes the value of forest products consumed or used by households and cash income from sales of forest products. Although consumption is often preferred to income as a welfare measure in household studies (Deaton 1980), we follow Cavendish (1999, 2000) by using total household income. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||