Estimates of Livestock Feed from Forest for Integration into System of National Accounts – A case study of Lower Himalayas

The rapid changes in large scale human and biophysical processes – population explosion and migration, over harvesting, practices in traditional land use and livestock rearing practices lead to decrement of the overall productivity of socio-ecological systems in terms of quality and quantity for hilly population. This is critically disturbing the balance between the productivity of forest ecosystem and its utilisation by the households for their welfare. Therefore proper policy should be framed, which should integrate and fulfil the demand from the forest by the households and sustained the forest productivity. This is not possible without the proper accounting of forest inputs in the System of National Accounts (SNA) by allocating its real worth under Forestry sector, which is by and large responsible for the development and conservation of forest in country. However, the lack of the economic value of these, which is either not available or grossly under estimated, if available, compel the policy planners for its non-accounting. This study suggests that the payment vehicle against the goods and services from forest may be used to value the forest feed and may be incorporation into the SNA. Therefore, for policy instruments, the choice of people should be considered while formulating the policy for conservation of forest with proper integration of the value of forest provisioning services under the forestry sector.