カンボジア

Sustainable forest management is very important issue for local people and human being in the world. Every national and regional colleagues want to establish the new strategy for sustainable management in their forest. Royal Government of Cambodia (RGC) also has a same idea. Cambodia have faced political troubles and the Civil War since mid－1970s. 2～3 millions people were killed in the Civil War era. RGC has lost many important infrastructure, institutions and manufactural facilities at that time. People are very poor and 85% of them live in local area as household of farmers. Gross domestic product (GDP) per capita of the Cambodian is only 260 US＄ in 1999. Natural resources, especially forest resources, is the most important goods for revitalizing and rehabilitation of national economy. Concession system for forest exploitation in Cambodia have started 1994, and covered around seven (7) million hectares of forests in three years time. RGC has understood soon that she failed to collect big revenue through royalty from concessionaires. IIIegal felling, over cutting, illegal exporting, corruputions of officials, military groups' violence and such have carried out at the concessions and their neighbor areas. RGC could not stopped such rampant violence by 1998. The donated countries to RGC, NGO, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank assisted to reduce such violence and to enforce making new strategy for ,sustainable forest rnanagement. During around five years from 1994 to 1998, RGC has lost millions cubic meter of forest resources and several hundreds of million US dollars for royalty income. RGC changed the policy on forest management in around 1998, she strictly stopped the illegal cutting and corruption of officials, and promote to establish community forestry project with FAO, NGO and special countries. The community forestry program was encouraged since at the World Forest Congress in 1987. The ideology of its is the fotest for people. The project teams of community forestry in Cambodia is likely to joint local people and scattered national forests in/next to their villages. The new community forestry projects have not supported stable Cambodian law yet. Therefore they will be soon faced with rules which how do they manage the forests and who has what kinds of resources, and such. At any rate, it is very good matters for local people to be able to use the forests inside/next to villages. We want also to assist to develop the community forestry and establish new strategy on concession management system by the RGC.