Sometimes it seems – we cannot see the forest for the trees… Forests hold not only timber, but also products whose value in monetary terms runs to many tens of billions of euros or dollars. Because these goods are not recorded in official trade statistics, their economic value remains outside our field of attention. As a result, opportunities to address social problems and make headway against poverty go unused.

In the Roman Empire, customs duties on spices, and on black pepper in particular, made up almost a third of the empire's annual revenue. In the late Middle Ages, meanwhile, European efforts to cut out the middlemen and monopolise the spice trade led to colonisation in Africa and Asia. Historically, non-wood forest products have often played a significant part in the world economy.

Today, when the value of forests is recorded in official trade statistics, non-wood forest products are not taken into account. This is true both in Europe and in the rest of the world. These products are often left out of the added value attributed to forests, even though they account for a large share of many countries' economies. The list can take in a great deal, from medicinal plants and edible insects through to nuts, berries, herbs, bamboo and latex.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) calculates that annual producer income from non-wood products amounts to 88 billion US dollars. Add the value created by processing and other stages of the value chain, and the worth of these products reaches trillions of dollars.

What makes non-wood products distinctive

At present, only a very small number of non-wood products appear in official trade statistics – coffee, cocoa, rubber, vanilla, avocados and bananas – and all of these are counted as agricultural crops. Researchers believe that tens of thousands of different non-wood products are traded worldwide without being included in official statistics. The number of economically significant products, however, is far smaller.

One study estimated that between 3.5 and 5.8 billion people currently use non-wood products. About half of these users live in rural areas of the global South, the other half in cities and in the global North. Researchers have calculated that in subtropical and tropical countries roughly 28% of rural household income comes from non-wood products.

As scientists at the University of Copenhagen point out, this is good reason to include forest products in global trade accounting – products such as ginseng, shea nuts (vitellaria paradoxa; shea tree, shi tree or vitellaria), açaí berries (açaí berries), baobab, acacia gum and much else besides.

“We believe that around 30,000 different non-wood forest products are traded internationally, and fewer than fifty of them currently have a commodity code. We are talking about goods whose value runs to literally vast sums of money, sums that are not included in official statistics – and are therefore invisible. That means the countries and communities supplying these goods earn too little from them, partly because they do not invest in local processing enterprises,” stresses bioeconomics researcher Carsten Smith-Hall. “Because we underestimate the importance of these goods, we are missing obvious opportunities to fight poverty. These are goods that make a substantial contribution to food security, health and employment across much of the world, and especially in low- and middle-income countries.”

Specialists at the US Department of Agriculture have prepared a commentary in the journal Forest Policy and Economics, drawing attention to this large and still untapped potential.

Added value

There are many examples of valuable products that go unrecorded yet are traded on informal markets. One of them is the caterpillar fungus (Ophiocordyceps sinensis), which infects caterpillars and then grows out of their mummified bodies. On the Tibetan Plateau and in the Himalayas, people seize every opportunity to gather this medicinal fungus, known as yartsa gunbu and also called Himalayan Viagra.

Value chains that “cannot be seen”

Many non-wood products are gathered at particular times of year by smallholders in rural regions, for instance during periods when they are not working in the fields. At such times farmers head into the forest to gather the harvest. That makes production relatively hidden. Typically the smallholders then go to the village and sell what they have gathered to a local trader. The trader loads the goods onto a lorry and they are taken to wholesalers, who often export the products onward to other countries unprocessed. Yet these long logistics and value chains are “invisible” in every respect.

Particularly rare grades are exported to China, where they are sold as an aphrodisiac and as traditional medicine. This product can fetch around 11,500 euros a kilogram. Selling forest products in this way makes it possible to fight poverty and help transform local communities. It means people can send their children to better schools and build new homes. But because this trade goes unrecorded, local communities do not get from these products what they might. The absence of such products from official trade reports means they are ignored in areas that matter:

When funding is allocated to industry and the development of new technologies, these products are not given priority. That means many countries miss out on enormous sums tied to processing the product in the country where the raw material is gathered. Processing is where value is genuinely added to a product.

Another significant consequence is that non-wood products are not taken into account when policy on natural resource management is drawn up. Official records could also serve to monitor biodiversity. Many of these products appear on various red lists because they are considered to be over-exploited. In such cases investment may be needed to develop dedicated cultivation techniques rather than harvesting them from the wild. But if investors and decision-makers are unaware of a product's importance, the money goes elsewhere.

A product as a guarantor of wellbeing

In the researchers' view, one of the obstacles currently holding back the inclusion of non-wood products in trade reporting is the sheer number of products.

Shea nut oil is a common ingredient in body care products and is also used in chocolate and other goods. Shea nuts are an example of a non-wood forestry product that plays an important role in rural communities in West Africa.

“Shea nuts keep people in Ghana, Burkina Faso and elsewhere from sinking still deeper into poverty. Global demand for them has grown, boosting local incomes and giving people a cushion if, say, their livestock is stolen or the family is suddenly hit by some misfortune. In such a situation many go out to gather nuts in order to deal with an unexpected shortfall in income,” explains researcher C. Smith-Hall.

The general view among researchers and public authorities is that there are too many products to “keep track of”. Yet if a country listed the economically important products traded in large volumes, the list could be shortened from, say, 2,000 items to perhaps just fifteen. That would let people see which species are worth taking an interest in and where research activity and technological investment can most usefully be concentrated. This matters especially when it comes to developing cultivation methods.

The researchers further recommend setting up systematic data collection at local, national and global level on traded volumes and prices. They note that tools for this purpose have already been developed and could be made more widely available.

“We have an enormous untapped potential here, one that can help tackle extreme poverty while at the same time conserving nature and biodiversity. But that requires us to broaden our horizons rather than simply carrying on with the traditional focus on timber as the only forest resource that matters,” argues bioeconomics researcher C. Smith-Hall.