Certification of non-timber forest products: potential pathway toward balancing economic and environmental goals in southwest China

Non-timber forest products, or NTFPs, include a large variety of products. In different regions different products are relevant. In China, most prominent are medicinal plants; several thousand plant species form the basis for the traditional Chinese medicine. Many other products are important, for subsistence of the rural poor or even for high value and high revenue export, such as the Matsutake mushroom which is exported mainly to Japan. Only few products, though, like rattan and bamboo, have a huge industry behind them, and have correspondingly been researched intensively. That research lead also to domestication and the establishment of plantations which has taken away to some extent the pressure on the natural resource. Other NTFPs, however, are being over-harvested, some are even regionally extinct. Given the huge number of species harvested, utilized and traded, NTFP management becomes also a biodiversity conservation issue. The state of knowledge of and research about different NTFPs is extremely unbalanced: much is known about some, and close to nothing about others. NTFPs and their sustainable management for biodiversity conservation constitute a multi-facetted complex system. The challenges are manifold. We are convinced that they can be tackled best by efficient and trustful cooperation of experts from different disciplines and different regions. That was the reason why we convened a first Sino-German Symposium at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany, 13-17 March 2006, inviting about 10 experts from different research institutions in China and 10 from Germany. This Symposium was an excellent opportunity to bring together research groups from different institutions of China and Germany – and it is expected that it was the starting point for promising future cooperative activities.

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