The Importance Of Community-Based Forest Management

In response to concerns for food security and poverty alleviation, development agencies and organizations are introducing strategies that help to promote the self-reliance of poor people and communities through granting of land tenure. Tenure was originated from a Latin word "tenere" which means "to hold" or "to possess" (Harper, n.d). In 2003, Ciparisse defined land tenure as the relationship among people with respect to land and associated natural resources. Land tenure is the system of rights that govern access to and use of lands and other resources. Land tenure system can either be customary or statutory. According to Sunderlin et. al (2008), customary tenure system is based on informal agreement set by the community while statutory tenure

The communities should meet all the needed qualifications to be able to participate in CBFM. They must be Filipino citizens, living adjacent to the forest and highly dependent on forest resources. Participation in CBFM will have a great responsibility. In return, the community should do their responsibilities and obligations such as maintaining the sustainability of the land, using the rights in accordance with the law, preparing and implementing Community Resource Management Framework (CRMF) and a 5-Year Work Plan (WP), promoting social equity among members and acknowledging the rights of occupancy (Bacalla,

The communities should submit all the requirements needed to be able to secure their land which forces them to hire professionals to help them but most of them cannot afford to pay. These complex requirements are too technical and beyond the capability of the community. There are problems in the institutional support from the government such as the limited number of professional foresters who can provide technical support, insufficient financial support to the community, and the inability of the government to develop effective monitoring and evaluation to the land performance of the community. The Department of Environment and Natural Resources do not have enough employed foresters to guarantee the proper implementation of the CBFM policies at the community. The government gave the community a little amount which was insufficient for the maintenance of the land. In local community capacity, the lack of skills and unpreparedness of the community to manage their land have led to the loss of land tenure (Pulhin et. al, 2008). The factors explained above should be addressed for the land tenure security. Arial et. al (2011) defined tenure security as the assurance that an individual 's right to land will be acknowledged and will not be deprived by others. According to them, tenure security is very challenging because