Introduction

In recent years, natural and environment-friendly has become the trend, fashionable, chic and popular. This is perhaps the reason why setting up NTFP-based enterprises seemed easier. However, making them viable and sustainable is easier said than done. Market demands continue to change – the requirements for quality products become more and more stringent. The changing climate pattern significantly affects almost the entire chain of enterprise operations from the supply of raw materials to the delivery of products to the market. The business environment continuously becomes more competitive especially with the upcoming integration of the production and market base in the ASEAN region in 2015. All these inevitably boil down to one point – the need to strengthen and enhance the operations of the NTFP enterprises in order to thrive in this immensely challenging environment.

Beyond Business: Ensuring Viability, Sustainability and Resilience is aimed at enhancing the skills and knowledge of NTFP producers who have already embarked on their enterprises and who have basic understanding and know-how to manage an NTFP enterprise. The training will entail examining the enterprises’ internal value chain to map out their sources of strengths and weakness – harvesting and processing of raw materials, procurement, production, operations, storage and packaging, distribution, marketing, human resources. This stocktaking exercise would allow NTFP enterprises to come up with inputs in:

• Establishing standards, that will meet up and align with needs and requirements of the market.
• Increasing human resource capacity, systems management, connectivity, technology and market competence to address larger volumes and markets
• Formulating resource management plans to ensure that expansion of the business will not place undue stress on the resource; and
• Employing climate-proofing techniques to increase climate-resilience of NTFP enterprises;

Contents and focus of the training shall be on:

• Sustainable consumption and production of NTFP based products – the standardization of production processes to produce “sustainable” and quality products which are socially accountable and environmentally responsible that have been agreed upon by the community of artisans/producers and meet up with the quality standards of the market
• Resource Management Planning which covers regeneration, sustainable harvesting and participatory resource monitoring; and
• Basic understanding on disaster risk assessment and climate change adaptation that will guide in identifying climate-proofing techniques for NTFP enterprises;

Training methodologies shall be a combination of structured learning experiences, lecture-discussions, workshops which will be conducted in three full days and an additional day for the learning visit to one NTFP enterprise.