Emulating Indian agroforestry-based wood value chain for improving the wood-basedeconomy in Central Asian Countries

Abstract

Central Asian Countries (CACs) namely Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are forest scarce and wood deficit countries as such they largely depend on wood imports for meeting their domestic demand. The region has mainly extra-continental climate with generally low rainfall which makes suitable conditions for forests rare. The forest resources in CACs have historically been overexploited, resulting in low current wood production. Their wood value chains are still in early development, and existing plantation programs would benefit from further improvement. In contrast, India has a large forest area of 72.69 M ha, including 71.53 M ha of forest cover (21.76%) and 1.12 M ha of tree cover (3.41%). However, due to conservation priorities, wood harvests are limited to under 2 M m³—far below the national demand of approximately 100 M m³.  Its carefully crafted domestic wood production strategy from agroforestry based plantations and well-developed wood value chains are enabling major wood availability for the bulk of its domestic consumption and some for exports as wood products. Currently 92% of the wood production is produced from agroforestry plantations and small share from other Trees Outside Forests (TOFs).  Farmers are increasingly growing trees with agriculture crops in agroforestry for sale of wood. Currently the Poplar-based agroforestry is generating around INR 0.2 M/acre/year (1US$=INR 86) and that of Eucalyptus up to INR 0.1 M/acre/year. Such initiatives of massive agroforestry plantations for wood production are missing in CACs. India and CACs have some commonalities in term of a few similar geographical locations, and tree resources; and common agriculture based economies. The paper identified some potential and successful case studies of Poplar and Willow agroforestry based wood value chains from India and suggests their emulation to increase the wood based economy in CACs.