Social Forestry: Time to Modify Goals?
Harry W Blair Should social forestry be seen necessarily as yet another big farmer perversion of a rural development effort intended to bring benefits to marginal farmers and the landless but in fact putting additional income into the pockets of the rural rich? Or, can a case be made that perhaps social forestry objectives should be modified somewhat and that with a changed set of goals there is ample scope for a flow of benefits to the rural poor? Such questions are especially pertinent at present, given the government's programme for massive afforestation of degraded lands and the release in October 1985 of a World Bank-sponsored study calling for a five-year, $ 500 million, fuelwood- agro-forestry effort in India.
