By Claire Fram, Research Fellow, Livelihoods and Markets
November, Bokeo, Laos: Last month, members of RECOFTC’s team and representatives from the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland traveled to Bokeo, Lao PDR to follow up on site development for the ForInfo project. The three-year project, funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland, aims to empower forest-dependent communities and small holders in Cambodia, Lao PDR, Thailand, and Vietnam through holistic development of information networks at the community level.
The project takes the well-known premise that knowledge is power and turns it into a tool for poverty reduction. Helping local people learn how to generate quality information about their forest resources makes them better equipped to access markets for their products and services. Ultimately, improving rural people’s ability to generate and use information about forest resources can contribute not just to poverty reduction but also to the sustainability of forests, and global efforts to mitigate climate change by helping communities adapt.
RECOFTC's Blog for People and Forests 
REDD+, forests and food
At Durban’s Forest Day 5, the resounding message was that REDD+ will not work if people are hungry. How can we expect the poor to conserve forest resources if their food security – their very survival – rests on the use or consumption of those resources?
Part of the problem is a perceived trade-off between cultivating land for agriculture and preserving it as forestland. RECOFTC discusses this, and other opportunity costs of REDD+ for local people, in the latest REDD-Net Bulletin, in which we point out that current market values for forest carbon offsets simply cannot compete with global prices for crops like rubber, oil palm, and coffee.
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Posted by RECOFTC on January 17, 2012
https://recoftc.wordpress.com/2012/01/17/redd-forests-and-food/