Belu Myo Haung CF, Mohnyin Township, Kachin State
27 to 29 February 2020
This project is funded by the FAO-EU FLEGT support. With the collaboration of FFI, Myanmar Forest Certification Committee, MFCC decided to initiate the observation and demonstration of Community Forest Timber Legality Operational Procedures, CF-TLOPs. Secondly, drafted MTLAS checklist for CF has been tested in this pilot project and MFCC will be going to update again with the lesson learning of this CF-TLOPs project.
Between 2014 and 2015, FFI Myanmar implemented an EU-FAO FLEGT Support Project called “Improved legality, governance, and trade for community and smallholder timber in Myanmar”, which looked specifically at the options for sustainable small-scale timber production within the framework of FLEGT and third-party certification mechanisms. Results from that project include the development of a CF management manual for forest users and an improved understanding of the legality of community forestry timber.
This project used a bottom-up, participatory process to develop and test these measures with Forest User Group networks and local Forest Department stakeholders in Kachin state, and will facilitate them to represent their findings nationally.
The objectives of the field trip are as follows:
To draw lessons and priorities for sustainable smallholder and community timber production with a focus on policy requirements, capacity building, and further dialogue and research.
To identify the next steps for the various participants, funding priorities for donors, and possible follow-up projects.
Outputs:
The experience of pilot timber harvest from a community forest is shared with FLEGT stakeholders.
The pilot implementation of CFTLOP is reflected and stakeholder inputs are collected and recorded.
Moreover, this partner project’s objective with MFCC was to empower FUGs and local FD to devise, test and advocate within the VPA preparation process for a practical Community Forest Timber Legality Operational Procedures (CF-TLOPs) that will allow timber to be harvested and traded legally from licensed CF forests into the Myanmar timber market and also access/pilot test the MTLAS checklist for the Community Forestry to make sure that the checklist could be auditable or not and also to find out any gaps in the legality trace of the CF.
