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In the project region of the SMNR-CV, about 70 % of the land consists of forests, which makes it the most important natural resource, at least in terms of area coverage. Traditionally, these forests have been managed and/or protected by large scale State Forest Enterprises (SFE), which are, however, increasingly seen as not very efficient in their practices and in most cases exclude rural households from the potential benefits of sustainable use of forest resources.

At the end of the 1980ies and as a core element of the doi moi, the Government of Vietnam had allocated the larger part of all the agricultural land in the country to individual farmers, thus kicking off a boost in agricultural production. By the end of the 1990ies, a similar process of allocating forest land to farmers started, hoping for a similar positive effect on forest land. In Quang Binh, the GTZ-supported food security project pioneered this process by supporting the allocation of more than 40,000 hectares of forest land to about 11,000 individual land owners.

The results of the baseline survey of the SMNR-CV in 2004 indicated that the management of forest land distributed to households was still very unsystematic, not planned and not sustainable. Forest protection regulations had only been formally introduced (or imposed), but mostly as a blueprint without the participation of forest holders. Consequently, the regulations were not respected and followed; violations were not sanctioned. In most communes, forest land was allocated to individual households only (not user groups and communities), following mainly the principle of social equity. The official process of Forest Land Allocation had resulted in most people having tiny plots of forest land, rendering effective forest management next to impossible.

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In addition, “red book” titles were often issued for forest plots which had not been demarcated in the field, the new owner not knowing the exact location or boundaries. The resulting potential conflict with the new owners of neighboring plots contributed to a lack of investments into the new property. In the same sense, the subsidies expected from national targeted programs (e.g. 327 or 661 providing seedlings for free or for a very low nominal price) hindered own investments into forest development.

The project concept of the SMNR-CV addresses these problems by three sub-indicators, each of which contains an institutional aspect (issuance of provincial guidelines) and an aspect of widespread application of the innovative methods introduced:

In Quang Binh, improved provincial guidelines are issued

• on forest protection (until 12/2007),
• on forest land allocation (until 06/2008) and
• on community forestry (until 06/2009),
  and are applied in all rural districts by the relevant stakeholders in the protection and sustainable management of forest resources.

In the project implementation strategy, the three sub-indicators represent a sequence of tasks in the sense that guidelines for forest protection have to be in place and applied before forest land should be allocated to households or user groups. Likewise, community forestry (or more exactly “Community-based Forest Management”, CBFM) only makes sense after households and user groups have received secure land titles.