sell nontimber products to augment household income, few data relate to the number of people employed and the value of the outputs across the region. Nontimber forest products have generally been collected and consumed by those who collect them, others traded and processed before reaching the market. Women and children generally collect and pro­cess the nontimber products.
     In response to strong market demands, some nontim­ber products, such as rattan in Malaysia, are domesticated and grown in plantations for commercial use. Such prac­tices meet consumer needs without further depleting natural forest stock (Poh, 1994). Forest products formerly grown in the wild are now grown commercially, including tropi­cal fruits, cocoa, coffee, tea, cardamom, cinnamon, cashew and pepper. While domestication of some species could ex­pand to meet growing market demand, for many rural and upland residents collecting nontimber products remains a significant contribution to subsistence farming. In principle, the harvesting of nontimber products from natural forests should be sustainable. However, in practice this has often not been the case, particularly where changes in land tenure, hydropower projects and logging roads have given outside populations easy access to remote areas (Enters, 1997).

2.2.5.3   Plantation forestry Plantation forestry is another form of management found in the region. Five ESAP countries, China, India, Indone­sia, Japan and Thailand, ranked among the world's top ten plantation forestry countries. Together, these countries ac­counted for 55% of the world's forest plantation resources, 91% within Asia and the Pacific (Brown and Durst, 2003). The average age of Asia's industrial plantations is less than 15 years (FAO, 2001). This has come primarily from the rapid acceleration in plantations in China and the short rotations generally used in that country. Older plantations were mostly in Japan (FAO/RAP, 2003).
     With the diminishing availability of large-diameter tim­ber from natural forests in the region, plantation forestry is fast becoming the alternate source for wood in ESAP. The region accounted for more than 80% of forest plantations in the tropics (Enters, 1997). Most of the legally produced industrial wood in the region has come from plantation for­ests. Most plantation forestry is intensively managed mon­ocultures, mainly pine, teak, poplar, acacia and eucalypts, cultivated for a relatively narrow range of products and spe­cies (Enters, 1997).
     Plantation forests have considerable diversity in owner­ship, management, scale and products. Plantation systems have been established to meet the need for fuelwood, poles, wood chips, furniture wood and estate crops, including rub­ber, oil palm and coconut. Until the last 25 years, forest plantations were largely smallholder or government oper­ated. The growing trend has been increasing private invest­ment and management of forest plantations in response to increasing demand for wood for pulp, furniture and par-ticleboard. Smallholder plantations have sprung up to meet this market in the some ESAP countries, such as the Philip­pines (Garrity and Mercado, 1994; Pasicolan et al., 1997), Laos (Roder et al., 1995), India and Thailand.
     The technological innovations in plantation forestry de­pend on the production objectives—conservation, fuelwood,

fiber, or sawlogs. The technology and management adopted by plantation operators include improved seedling produc­tion by using polyethylene bags, centralized nurseries, thin­ning and pruning for sawlog production. Breeding programs and improved planting material from tissue culture were still relatively minor (Enters, 1997). Improved trees have been limited to large commercial plantations, particularly in China. Virtually no improvement has been done for spe­cies commonly used in multipurpose small farm operations. Harvesting technology ranges from manual to completely mechanized, mostly in response to rising labor costs and increasing concern about minimizing soil disturbance.
     Although the reduced species diversity and the younger tree age associated with plantation forests provide condi­tions favorable for pests and diseases, uniform products of­ten compensate for these risks. Plantation forestry is seen by many as a way to address environmental objectives, such as soil conservation, mitigation of erosion, carbon sequestra­tion, and rehabilitation and protection of habitats for im­portant wild flora and fauna.

2.2.5.4   Wood-processing technology
Wood-processing capacity in the region has increased sig­nificantly over the past 30 years, concentrated in the most industrialized  countries.  Most  of the  technological  im­provements in wood processing have come through adapt­ing technology from industrial countries, such as medium-density fiberboard. Most modern processing machinery has been imported from Europe (Enters, 1997). It has gener­ally been adapted for processing small-diameter trees from forest plantations. Medium-density fiberboard production emerged as a response to shortages in raw material and the newly developed ability to use untapped resources to pro­duce a plywood-like product. Medium-density fiberboard and similar products became price-competitive alternatives to plywood, particleboard and hardboard (Adhar, 1996). Within ESAP, Malaysia is the number one exporter of ve­neer sheets, Indonesia the number one exporter of plywood, followed by Malaysia, China and New Zealand.
     With many governments banning or severely restricting the export of unprocessed logs, a demand has developed for efficiently processing and converting sawn timber into parti­cleboard and other panels. Likewise, some wood previously considered to have little or no value, such as rubber wood, is now being processed for the furniture industry. Largely as the result of the research at the Forest Research Institute in Malaysia, a major market has developed for rubber wood in furniture and panels. More recently, the technology for pro­cessing rubber wood has been applied to oil palm stems and research is looking at using oil palm fiber as an ingredient in wood-based boards, pulp and chipboard. Compared with natural wood and plywood products, composite, defect-free fiberboard can be easily produced in large, uniform sizes (Yayah et al., 1995). When the supply of natural fiber begins to dwindle, the panel processing industry will likely intro­duce nonwood fibers. Most major nonwood fiber processing facilities are in China and India (Enters, 1997).

2.2.5.5  Agroforestry
Agroforestry in its simplest form means integrating trees with crops or livestock enterprises in a farming system. Tree