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Bamboo as an economic driver for the rural economy
I developed this model of using bamboo as an economic driver for my paper that was presented at the World Bamboo Congress at Bali in 1995. The Seedlings of Wealth model was further developed at the request of the UNDP in India as part of my Vision Report for the national bamboo development project titled "From the Land to the People: Bamboo as a sustainable human development resource for India" which was prepared in 1999. The diagram can be enlarged and downloaded by clicking on the picture above. The otrher parts of this strategy are outlined in the pages following this one through the links provided below.
The key to this strategy is based in bamboo being used as a cultivated resource which can be intensively managed to produce high quality resources for local consumption with the use of appropriate technologies and more importantly with the use of intensive knowledge inputs in innovation and design across all the stages of cultivation and utilisation and to markets, both local and export. Such a strategy would give the rural inhabitants a perennial resource that can be fashioned into a whole range of end uses in an imaginative and economically and socially beneficial manner.
The strategy included the possibility of at least three distinct types of cultivation to be adopted by the local farmers and it could extend to cultivation on large corporate farms where desired and it calls for a distinctly regulated method for the utilisation of forest bamboo which has been the dominant form of access in India over the years. For the local farmers the forms could include bamboo as a planned plantation crop and this could be developed as multi-crop organic farms that can use a selected species of bamboo that is suitable for the particular agro-climatic regional characteristic in which they operate. The second form could be in the use of bamboo as a windbreaker and fence on farms and fields of other cultivated food crops. Such farm bund plantations could provide a regular supply of good quality bamboo for a variety of end uses without disrupting the regular food crops production of the region. The third form is the small-scale homestead cultivation that is possible and indeed practiced in many parts of India already where the bamboo is used for own consumption by the population for home construction and for making objects of everyday use. Such homestead farms can support micro-scale enterprises where the local craftsmen can build a small enterprise for craft based production, all of which helps produce wealth and employment for the economic development of the region.
Linking this locally grown bamboo to nearby cities with the use of design and marketing strategies is the other end of the supply chain to this wealth creation effort. Here we had recommended the use of community managed use of power tools and common facility centres that could facilitate local conversion of the bamboo into a usable form of raw material that is aligned to the downstream uses to which it is applied in each specific context. This is the key to adding value to the local bamboo there by contributing to wealth generation and economic development in a sustainable manner.
Prof. M P Ranjan
Head, NID-CBI
16 July 2005 at 8.20 pm IST
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