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  • Women's hidden harvest: Indigenous vegetables and amaXhosa cultural survival in Hobeni Village, South Africa

Women’s hidden harvest: Indigenous vegetables and amaXhosa cultural survival in Hobeni Village, South Africa


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FTA COMMUNICATIONS TEAM

This book is about the people of Hobeni Village and the protected area that neighbors them, the Dwesa-Cwebe Nature Reserve. For over 100 years, the communities next to the Dwesa and Cwebe Forests have been caught in a conflict over natural resources. Residents were forcibly removed for decades by colonial and apartheid-era governments. After being declared a protected area in 1978, local people lost access to natural resources in the forest. Although the communities won a land claim battle in 2001, local people were prohibited from harvesting natural resources until 2016, including a variety of forest foods. Remarkably, the indigenous knowledge associated with these foods endured through the stories, actions, and resistance of local women.

This book aims to capture the experiences of these women, and to provide an accessible text documenting their stories of cultural and physical survival.


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  • Secrets of the Mutis Honey Hunters

Secrets of the Mutis Honey Hunters


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FTA COMMUNICATIONS TEAM

This story book is based on traditions and folk tales passed down for generations by the Olin Fobia people in Bonleu village, South Central Timor, Indonesia. These traditions have been practiced for hundreds of years. As some Olin Fobia traditions and tales are beginning to disappear, the Kanoppi Project and CIFOR are striving to document them before they do. Further, this book aims to motivate the younger generation to become involved in efforts to preserve forests, and to protect forest flora and fauna and their habitats.


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  • NTFP harvesters as citizen scientists: Validating traditional and crowdsourced knowledge on seed production of Brazil nut trees in the Peruvian Amazon

NTFP harvesters as citizen scientists: Validating traditional and crowdsourced knowledge on seed production of Brazil nut trees in the Peruvian Amazon


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FTA COMMUNICATIONS TEAM

Understanding the factors that underlie the production of non-timber forest products (NTFPs), as well as regularly monitoring production levels, are key to allow sustainability assessments of NTFP extractive economies. Brazil nut (Bertholletia excelsa, Lecythidaceae) seed harvesting from natural forests is one of the cornerstone NTFP economies in Amazonia. In the Peruvian Amazon it is organized in a concession system. Drawing on seed production estimates of >135,000 individual Brazil nut trees from >400 concessionsand ethno-ecological interviews with >80 concession holders, here we aimed to (i) assess the accuracy of seed production estimates by Brazil nut seed harvesters, and (ii) validate their traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) about the variables that influence Brazil nut production.

We compared productivity estimates with actual field measurements carried out in the study area and found a positive correlation between them. Furthermore, we compared the relationships between seed production and a number of phenotypic, phytosanitary and environmental variables described in literature with those obtained for the seed production estimates and found high consistency between them, justifying the use of the dataset for validating TEK and innovative hypothesis testing. As expected, nearly all TEK on Brazil nut productivity was corroborated by our data. This is reassuring as Brazil nut concession holders, and NTFP harvesters at large, rely on their knowledge to guide the management of the trees upon which their extractive economies are based. Our findings suggest that productivity estimates of Brazil nut trees and possibly other NTFP-producing species could replace or complement actual measurements, which are very expensive and labour intensive, at least in areas where harvesters have a tradition of collecting NTFPs from the same trees over multiple years or decades. Productivity estimates might even be sourced from harvesters through registers on an annual basis, thus allowing a more cost-efficient and robust monitoring of productivity levels.


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