Could the hillside communities, guardians of Nepal’s forests, be a model for a unified and more prosperous future? Malcolm Doney and Martin Wroe report.

It is monsoon season in the towering Dhaulagiri hills. There is no rain today, but vast amounts of water still hurtle off the precipitous slopes into the rivers below. Terraced pools stripe the hills, rimmed with the acid green of rice paddies, here and there tended by women in saris of vivid pink or scarlet.

High as these hills are, they are dwarfed by the Himalayas which shimmer in the distance. The forest-covered higher reaches are interspersed with small settlements which sprawl among the trees and in one of these, in the village of Jhauri 50-year old Khaganath Aryal squats on his verandah leaning against the wall – a picture of concentration. He is making a broom from tall grass. Opposite him, his wife Maya is grinding dried plants into powder for traditional ayurvedic medicine. Inside the house their daughter, Dura, 17, gets the stove going, while their son Santos, 13, shovels cow dung into a concrete cylinder. Sunta, 14, another son, is tending to the goats.

This is no idyll, it’s hard work but it’s also productive and profitable, just. With their vegetable garden and animals they are more or less selfsufficient. They sell the brooms and medicine and goats to neighbours or visiting traders. They have even opened a small shop selling tea, sugar and confectionery. The younger children now go to school.. “We are definitely better off than we used to be,” says Maya, with satisfaction.

So what happened? The Aryal family illustrate the steady, unspectacular but material change taking place among forest communities across Nepal – a change which is both improving lives and transforming the environment.

The key to the transformation is a DFID-funded initiative called the Livelihoods & Forestry Programme (LFP) which is working with almost half a million households (11% of the country’s people) in remote and dirt poor forest communities. As forest covers around 40% of the country, almost 60% of Nepal’s rural population depend on the forests and natural resources for their livelihoods. LFP operates in 15 hilly districts, crisscrossed by deep gorges and fast rivers, where paved roads are a rarity.

Fifteen years ago much of Nepal’s forest was exploited or wasted. Though technically owned by the government,

rich elites plundered them with illegal logging, while poor communities raided woodland for fuel, or cut it down for grazing or crops. It left vast stretches of barren, deforested land where young trees had been removed because they were easier to fell.

But when the 1993 Nepal Forest Act opened tracts of forest for community use, forest user groups emerged to take advantage of the resource. This was not uncontested, and the group in Jhauri, not unusually, had to fight off the claims of rich and organised business who had their own industrial-scale plans for the area. It took three years of court appearances before they secured the use of the land.

To date 21% of government controlled forest has been handed over as community forest, with a further 60% ripe to be placed into community hands.

And community is the key word. In remote hamlets like Jhauri, it is not possible to survive as an individual – everyone needs everybody else. This understanding is at the heart of the LFP philosophy. Households are encouraged to join together in community forest user groups (inelegantly known as C-FUGs). Many of these groupings have flowered into vibrant community organisms – clearing houses for local concerns, the loci of social cohesion. Looking up from his broom making Khaganath says, “The benefits of the forest users group are shared with everyone here.”

When the 81 households who form the C-FUG first joined together, the steep bank down to the river was barren and eroding. Now it is thickly wooded. Villagers have collectively benefited from forest management training – learning how to grow and coppice woodland. All this has not only made the forest more abundant, it has also brought it closer to home. Maya Aryal recalls how she had to rise extra early to gather fuel and fodder. “I had to climb miles up into the forest every day, always carrying a heavy load on my head, and not return home till very late.” This meant she had little time to spend with the children and round the house tending the garden and cooking. “Now I only have to do that a few days a year to collect firewood, and only ten days a month to collect fodder.” Even this is a communal activity. “The whole group decides which day we go, so that reduces the time we all spend walking back.”

The community agree together who needs most help, from ‘very poor’ to ‘rich’ (the latter is something of a comparative term). According to their needs, each has access to certain resources. The Aryals, for instance, were classified as very poor and had no land of their own, and they have been able to take over a tract of community land and a section of forest, together with loans from a revolving fund – which is how they managed to develop their goat rearing business.

The family’s energy and imagination has meant this year they are due to become merely ‘poor’. But while this itself carries a risk – because the more you have the less help you get – nevertheless Khaganath is pleased to be making “a step higher” because it means his family economy is on a firmer footing and he believes it is right that others should now receive help. “Many other people are poorer than me.”

Social mobility and ‘inclusion’ is integral to these forestry user groups. Dalits, women, Janajatis, Madhesis and Muslims – the groups normally deemed second class or worse in Nepali society (see box on page 17) – are positively encouraged to play a full part in decision making. Women, for instance make up a quarter of group leadership nationwide, and in Jhauri fill over 60% of committee positions.

Including people who for centuries have been ignored does not come easily and the C-FUG here has formed smaller sub-groups to give them confidence to make their voices heard and help shape community policy. The signs that this is working are clear when Bishnu Regmi stands up to speak confidently about the importance of sustainability to a meeting in the village hall – not so long ago she and others like her would not even have dreamed of making their voices heard.

Bishnu, 30, has two children and wants to make sure they and their children have a livelihood too. “We need the forest,” she says, “So we plant it. The forest is for all of us – we look after it so it will look after us.” The community has recently reached parity in its use of fuel wood, and is now growing more than it is using. This is not theoretical greenliving, it is practical correspondence with the land. As a result the people of Jhauri are eating better, growing healthier and even (unheard of for many years) learning to live with the raids from the occasional leopard as biodiversity increases.

The hard-working Aryal family and their community are an emblem of what the new Nepal could look like. C-FUG organisations like these were robust enough to survive the ten years of conflict, a time when most NGOs left the rural areas for security reasons. And when many rural organisations were forced to disband as the Maoists accused them of oppressing the poor or acting as tools of government, forest user groups stood up to the most rigorous scrutiny, because they were democratic, transparent and dedicated to helping the poorest of the community. In fact, as much of local government disintegrated they often became the de facto local authority, helping rural people who needed anything from citizenship to a birth certificate.

They are now a deeply embedded part of the anthropology and culture of many hillside communities. Like the forest, they are helping to bind the soil and prevent erosion. If the new Nepal is going to flourish it will grow in places like Jhauri.