| | Cross River State in Nigeria's southeast contains the country's last major blocks of tropical high forest. Facilitated by the UK's aid agency, the Department for International Department (DFID, then called the Overseas Development Administration, ODA), the State was probably the first in tropical Africa in the early 1990s, followed by Cameroon, to pioneer de-centralised forest management (community forestry) through empowering village authorities to manage more sustainably forests inside village boundaries (the forest commons now known as 'community forests'); from the mid-1990s the State was probably the first in humid forest Africa to generate a widespread movement by village youth and a few state level elites against illegal logging. Currently, the State is home to an hitherto 'invisible' (un-noted by donors and non-government organisations, NGOS) tropical African first: village women's resistance to men's alienation of large forest blocks from whose ranges they gather many non-timber forest products (NTFPs) that constitute the bulk of their families' means of subsistence and income generation 1 |
