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Minority report

  • 27/02/2003

Minority report India's mfp sector is quite in the dark. Non-nationalised mfp items haven't been surveyed. "To manage a resource, you have to know what it is. I doubt if a working plan officer of a forest department can guarantee whether the species enlisted as mfp are present in the forest or no,' says Bhojvaid of fri. "Foresters all over the world have been trained only in management of timber, and not mfp. That's why it is difficult to get the contribution of mfp to the gdp of any region.' The Indira Gandhi National Forest Academy in Dehradun put mfp in the curriculum only in 2001.

Absence of hard data means the forest department often issues blanket bans. To ban an mfp is to sign its death warrant, an open invitation for smugglers to take over. The first ingenious scheme to market a herbal product of forestry origins and share the benefits with tribals was in Kerala. The tribe was Kani; the wonder herb was arogyapacha. The experiment didn't take off because the forest department didn't allow leaves cultivated by the Kani people inside the forest to be transported

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